


Never No Locomotive

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Beat Generation, Counterculture, East Village, F/M, Homophobic Language, I'm sorry Fangs, Internalized Homophobia, Joavin, Lower East Side, Minor Character Death, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Poetry, Racist Language, Slurs, Tonica, Vietnam War, draft dodging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:02:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26560336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Thanks to @arsenicpanda who gave the prompt and who also beta read this for me. Any errors of grammar or taste that remain are entirely mine. It's set in 1965 when the draft for the Vietnam war was calling for greater and greater numbers of young men. It deals with avoiding the draft, the attitudes towards Black people and LGBTQ people, the sexism of the era and the countercultural vibe of the East Village. It's an East Village, beat poetry, counter culture, draft evading, fake marriage, corruption exposing fic, if that's the kind of thing you like then this is for you!
Relationships: Betty Cooper & Jughead Jones
Comments: 63
Kudos: 27
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	1. Sometime They'll Give a War and Nobody Will Come (Carl Sandburg- The People, Yes)

**Author's Note:**

> OK folks, real talk. This fic is set in the sixties and they were different times...not, as we shall see, as different as we might wish but different. I have used terminology that might offend some of you (it certainly offends me!) but I think it's important not to pretend that those terrible words weren't used. Kevin has some internalised homophobia and it is expressed in the words he chooses to describe himself at the start of the story...don't worry, I wouldn't leave him there. Toni experiences racism, as you might expect but also good people use words we wouldn't use today...because we have learned better. The past is a different country....but maybe not different enough. 
> 
> I use the word "coloured" throughout which is, quite clearly, not a word that people should use today. If you are interested in why this word was used by both Black people and white people of good conscience in the past, there is a really interesting article here https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/30/295931070/the-journey-from-colored-to-minorities-to-people-of-color?t=1602412264410. Also I found this article very thought provoking and challenging https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-dahleen-glanton-colored-email-reading-list-20200304-utx7geiwm5hupa3t7w6xr3xqn4-story.html
> 
> I can't imagine the experience of folks who experience racism and homophobia everyday. I can imagine being challenged by those experiences to do better as an ally, to learn and to challenge discrimination, especially when it is discrimination which tries to give me advantages at the expense of someone else. I wrote this story as a tribute to people in the past who stood up for what was right rather than accepting the status quo. Now, more than ever, it is an important example for us all to follow.

“Mrs Keller, would you come in please?” The police officer courteously stood aside in the doorway to let Betty enter the interview room and take a seat. She had come dressed in the genteel way her mother would have attired herself for an interview with law enforcement but, under the circumstances, she felt like a fraud. She unbuttoned her jacket and removed her hat, placing it on the table next to her purse, then smiled demurely as the officer sat down opposite her.

“Thank you for coming in ma’am. Perhaps you would tell me in your own words about the events of June 2nd? I’ll make some notes and then we can write up your statement and let you get on with your busy day.”

“Thank you. Once I’m done here there’s the market, dinner to prepare, the ironing. It’s all go-go-go. ” Betty replied, possibly overplaying the role of the young housewife, making time for her civic duty amongst her domestic chores. “Listen to me, rattling on. I’m sorry. On that day I was working late in the store. Mr Chipping hired me as a typist as well as a store assistant and he has me type up work by new poets so that we can print them on the mimeograph machine and sell the collections in the store. Anyway on Wednesday evening I was working with Mr Jones —he’s an up and coming writer in the East Village— to prepare a pamphlet of his poetry. I heard a noise in the store and, when I went down the corridor to check, the place was ablaze. Mr Jones and I made our escape via the restroom window and I called for the fire department from the coffee place just down the street, the Twilight. Then we alerted Mr Chipping who lives above the store and, fortunately, he was able to jump to safety.”

“And where was Mr Jones while this daring rescue was happening?”

“Oh I don’t know. Perhaps he’d gone home? I really couldn’t say.”

“Well that doesn’t seem like the actions of a gentleman, does it? You’re sure that he couldn’t have set the fire?”

“Oh he’s not a gentleman. He’s a poet. They tend to be…well…different. But he couldn’t have caused the fire. He wasn’t out of my sight. I think that’s really all I can say about it.”

“And you didn’t see anyone suspicious when you were exiting the building or later when Mr Chipping was jumping out of the window?”

“No, I mean to say, it’s Avenue C. I don’t exactly know what would count as suspicious there. You, probably.”

The officer smiled thinly at her joke. “Very well Mrs Keller. I’ll write this up and have you read it over and then you can be off about your little errands.”

Thirty minutes later Betty left the precinct and walked briskly to the corner where she stood with her back against the wall and took several deep, shaking breaths. Jughead stepped over from where he had been leaning against his motorcycle and grinned at her. “All OK? They bought it?”

“I guess so. How about you?”

“Yeah. I just said I was sensitive and the fright had upset me. I told them I was writing a poem about it and asked if they wanted me to read it to them. I was out of there in about ten minutes flat.”

“They believed that?” she queried sceptically, looking him up and down in a way that made him blush endearingly. She thought her reservations were justified. He looked like the kind of young man her mother had warned her about, his dark hair curling over his collar, untouched by either comb or pomade. Dark jeans, a leather jacket and a cynical demeanour didn’t seem like the best way to present oneself as a trembling milquetoast to the officers of the seventh precinct. 

“I wore Rupert’s itchy goddamn tweed. And his eyeglasses. Couldn’t see for shit, sorry, excuse my French. And I twitched and fidgeted. They bought it.”

“How the hell did I get here Jughead? I’m supposed to be a respectable, upstanding citizen. Instead I’m lying to the police, covering up a crime, and I’m an accessory to —what?— blackmail, I guess. You know you’re a bad influence, right?”

“Hmm, I wonder if you’re quite as respectable as all that Keller. Are you sure that’s not a fake out, even to yourself? Anyway Rupert’s watching Bret so I’d better get back. We’ve got an appointment with the Dean. Take care, pretty lady. See you tomorrow at the Twilight to catch up?” She agreed and they arranged to meet at ten.

He strode over to the bike and lifted a long leg over the saddle. She longed to hitch her skirt, climb on behind him, press her body tight against his and take off forever, light out for the territory, Canada, Mexico, somewhere that she could wake up, naked, alongside his lean, beautiful form and never worry about the war or the draft or the crushing machinery of the state again. But he rode off and she straightened her hat and went to turn in their article to Larry and Terry, the editors of the East Village Eye. She really hoped they would actually be clothed this time, it was far from a given. As she walked she tried to answer her own question. How had she exchanged the stifling safety of the Riverdale Register for the disorder, jeopardy and casual disregard for common decency at the Eye? Of course the simplest answer was that she had been caught up in one of Kevin’s schemes.

Two years earlier, the summer of ’63, everything had seemed so easy and full of hope. A handsome young president in the White House, senior year about to begin, high school graduation on the horizon. She was young, her future glittering ahead of her, an interesting career, her own happy family one day, everything that was promised to her by the t.v. commercials. It had never occurred to her to question the desirability of that tidy, ordered, affluent life or what it would cost. Then, that Fall, a bullet in Dallas seemed to draw down a curtain on all that optimism. Day by day through senior year, the gloss of the future seemed to tarnish and peel away, revealing something corrupt beneath the veneer. And then, sitting with her best friends in their usual booth in Pop’s, the day after graduation, Archie told them that he had been to the recruitment office and signed away his life.

“It’s actually a smart move Betty,” he smiled confidently. Of course Archie was always confident. The dumber his choices, the more vigorously he pursued them. “I get to choose what service I join. I get to do something that actually interests me. If I waited to get drafted I’d be a grunt, taking fire in some rotten paddy field. This way I get trained by the navy and I’ll have a career when I get out of the service. And I get to serve my country. I’m proud to go and do my duty.”

Kevin was looking increasingly nauseous so she took his hand under the table, and gave him a reassuring smile before turning back to the newest naval recruit. “It’s your choice Archie, but you can’t seriously think that all you young men getting shot way out in Asia is doing the country any good. It’s just a terrible, wicked waste. We’ve had far too much of that kind of waste already.”

Archie was getting mad now. He’d expected to be hailed as a hero not on the wrong end of some pacifist diatribe. “Well you two just sit here and eat your ice cream while real men go and protect you from the red menace.” He scooted out of the booth and stormed off, letting the door slam behind him.

Kevin looked stricken, “Betty, what the hell am I going to do? People are expecting me to enlist, I can tell. They know my dad’s a hero, they expect the same from me. And if I don’t sign up it’ll be like Archie says. I’ll be drafted and then I’ll end up getting my ass shot off in a foxhole in some terrible unpronounceable Asian hell hole. It’s not fair. Guys like me aren’t cut out for any of this.” Kevin had grown up in the shadow of his dad’s heroism. It was hard for him to accept himself when the pattern his father set before him had been drafted to be cut from entirely different cloth.

She wanted to reassure him, “It’ll be fine Kev. Archie’s got some sort of hero complex, always trying to throw himself at trouble. You won’t get drafted. The more men try and get ahead of it like Archie, the fewer they’ll need to conscript. Try not to worry. Or get a college deferment. I’ll bet it’s not too late to apply.”

“We can’t afford it. Dad says if I went to a local college, lived at home, we might make it work but I have to be in New York. Auditions, Broadway, The Great White Way! But a cop’s salary won’t cover college in New York, even with his army pension. I guess I’ll just have to take my chances.”

She had anticipated that she would feel a little jealous as she waved Kevin off on the bus to New York City but she was shocked to realise that she was jealous of Archie too. He was, at least, going somewhere, getting out, while she was still Betty Cooper of Riverdale in knee socks and a ponytail and going to work everyday at the Register. She’d considered college but her mother said it was a waste of money. She’d be married soon and she didn’t need an expensive education to keep her husband from straying and her babies clean and fed. She could stay at home, work at the Register and save up for her trousseau. She was being bricked up like a medieval nun, watching helplessly as the walls enclosed her in stultifying, terrifying imprisonment. 

Her mother must have noticed that she was out of sorts. “Come along young lady, sit up straight and smile. You don’t know what the day might bring. A handsome young man might walk down the street any minute and look in that window and see you, checking the copy, all neat and clean as a pin. He’ll say to himself, “Well that’s just the girl for me,” and then, before you know it, there’ll be a little house and a baby carriage and everything will be different. If you’re slouching and scowling what will he think of you? Not a lot, that’s what.”

Betty wanted to punch her imaginary suitor right in the nose for his shallowness. She didn’t want to be displayed in the office window like the prize turkey in the butcher’s shop. She didn’t want a man who chose her because she was neat and clean and bland. She wanted to be wild and dishevelled and loved for it, she wanted chaos and disruption; she would be Dean Moriarty, breaking hearts and leaving rage and confusion in her wake. But she still took up her green pen and continued to proof read the evening copy.

Archie sent misspelled postcards from basic training that made her smile and shake her head. Kevin sent long, gossipy, scurrilous letters about shows he’d seen and parties he’d attended. He mentioned lots of friends, all men. She had long suspected that Kevin would be a “confirmed bachelor” but it wasn’t something she could discuss with him. If he didn’t like girls then that was his business. It didn’t make her think less of him, although she was a little sad because he would have been a wonderful father, funny and kind and loving. She hated that, if she was right, he might be lonely. He would never be able to share his life openly with someone, have a beautiful wedding, a first dance. That was a shame.

In addition to her loneliness and boredom the news on t.v. was becoming more and more worrying every evening. LBJ was sending ever larger numbers of young men to South East Asia despite his earlier promises to de-escalate the war. She worried about Archie and Reggie, about all of her classmates who enlisted straight after graduation. Polly was anxious too because Jason kept saying in his letters that he felt like a coward because he was sitting in a library at Yale when he should have been doing his duty for his country as his father and grandfather had. Polly pleaded with him not to do anything foolish and she and Cheryl spent long evenings together intensifying each others’ panic about their beloved JJ. All those boys carrying their draft cards, waiting and worrying. So much about being female rankled but Betty was glad not to have that particular sword of Damocles over her head.

In December Kevin wrote her that he was coming home for a Christmas visit. He said he needed to discuss something with her and suggested that they went to the Italian restaurant in Greendale. Betty was bewildered, he had never suggested such a thing in the past, it seemed almost as if he were asking her on a date. She wondered if she had been wrong about her best friend all these years. 

Kevin collected her from her house in his dad’s truck, dressed in a blazer and a striped tie. She was glad that she’d put on a pretty dress when she saw him, but she felt discomfited by this development in their friendship. She loved Kevin, would do anything for him, but she had absolutely no romantic feelings for him at all. She had briefly entertained a crush on Archie in junior year but, when she thought about some of the opinions he held and the way that he never laughed at, or even seemed to notice, her jokes, she had reasoned herself out of it. Besides something had been missing. She knew that Polly desired Jason, she spoke of how his voice made her heart race and how she sometimes touched him, intimately, “to give him some relief,” when they were kissing. Betty found that a little shocking and had certainly never wanted to touch a boy like that in her life. She supposed she might be one of those blue stockings who didn’t care about physical relationships, although Cheryl, to mock her prudishness, had given her a copy of a poem by a woman called Lenore, mimeographed in purple ink on a sheet of shiny paper. Cheryl’s friend Heather had sent it to her after hearing the poetess read it at the University of California. It was called “To Fuck With Love” and it was shockingly filthy. “I love you / your cock in my hand, stirs like a bird, in my fingers, as you swell and grow hard in my hand, forcing my fingers open, with your rigid strength, you are beautiful / you are beautiful, you are a hundred times beautiful.” Betty hid the poem at the back of her bookshelf but she read it often and she felt excited by it. The power of the woman in the poem, to hold a man in her hand, to make him transform himself at her touch, there was, she would have to admit, something thrilling and magical in that. It even sounded like an incantation.

As she thought about the poem, her cheeks flushed, and Kevin looked at her oddly. “Is everything ok Betty?” he asked solicitously. 

“Yes, of course. Why are we here Kevin? What’s this all about?” She didn’t want to lead him on only to disappoint him if he had decided to declare himself to her.

He drew in a steadying breath and squared his shoulders. “Right, you know my dad is ex army?” 

“Of course, he’s a war hero. The Medal of Honour Kev. Everyone in town knows.”

“Well, one of his army buddies, a four star general, called him up and asked if I was already enlisted. He said no and his buddy said that was a mistake. LBJ’s going to ramp up the draft. This guy says there’ll be a huge increase next year. He suggested I try for the coastguard if I don’t want to be drafted into the army. My dad sounded it out but there’s this crazy wait list and anyway I hate the water. I can’t do it Betty, not any of it, coastguard, army, none of it. I can’t and that’s it. I guess I’m a coward but the thought of it makes me throw up. I wake up in the morning and vomit as soon as I remember. I can’t kill anyone. I don’t see why we should go over there and burn those folks’ homes and kill them. And I’m scared.” His voice was low, almost a whisper and when a waiter came he stopped and stared down at the red and white checkered tablecloth, humiliated.

Betty was gripped by a fierce desire to help her friend, “There has to be a way out of it. Look Kev, we haven’t talked about this and I don’t want to offend you but the army won’t take you if you…if you’re…if you like…” 

“If I’m a fag--," he stopped abruptly, Betty's hand gripping his arm.

"Don't Kevin. That's such an ugly, hateful word. I'd never say that."

He took a deep breath, "But that **is** what you’re trying to say isn't it? Well I am a ...homosexual. I didn’t want to be. I begged God to let me not be, to change me, but I am and there’s just nothing I can do about it. And what if I turn up at the physical and tell the shrink I like men? Can you imagine what it’d do to my father? He knows, of course he knows, but we don’t talk about it. My aunts whisper ‘Oh Kevin’s flamboyant,’ and my dad seems to shrink a little. He loves me anyway but I can’t have his army buddies finding out that Tom Keller’s kid’s a fairy, pitying him, looking down on him, blaming him for what I am. I can’t bear it Betty. I’d rather just throw myself off the Brooklyn Bridge and save everyone the trouble of shipping me all the way out to Vietnam to be killed.” His eyes were wet with tears and there was a quiver in his voice. He picked nervously at the dribbled wax on the outside of the wine bottle candle holder when the waiter brought their tagliatelle. Her heart was heavy with compassion for her friend. His honesty and vulnerability made her feel so close to him, he had shared his fear with her and she wouldn’t let him down.

“Ok so that won’t work. What’s your plan? Other than the Brooklyn Bridge because I won’t let that happen, not ever.”

“I could get married. I guess I mean **we** could get married. Married men are exempt.” He looked at her, green eyes, so like her own, earnest and hopeful.

Betty’s mouth fell open. This wasn’t how she’d imagined she’d receive her first proposal. “But Kev, we just said that you don’t like girls. I hate to break it to you. I’m a girl.”

“I know that, obviously. We’d get married but I wouldn’t bother you in that way. It’s different for girls I know. It’d just be a duty for you anyway. And a way to get babies. We could adopt a baby if you want one or we could ask a friend to help with that. Or maybe I could…I don’t know…if it was just like once or twice or something. I have a job now. A regular job. In a gentleman’s outfitters. My friend Abe owns the store. He lets me off to go for auditions. I have my own apartment and you could study or get a little job if you want. I’d keep you, support you. It’d be fun Betty. And if I get a part, make it big, we’d be a famous couple, in all the magazines. You’d have the prettiest dresses and we’d go to opening nights and parties together and no-one would know. What do you think?” He looked at her with such hope in his eyes that she felt mean to turn him down out of hand.

“It’s not exactly a young girl’s dream Kev. I’d like to have someone love me for me. It’d be nice if someone said they wanted to share their life with me.”

“But that’s what I’m saying. I like you better than anyone else. We’re best friends. I do want to share my life, just not every part of it. And if you stay here, you have to live with your folks, have them watching you all the time. If you were with me you’d be in the city, you’d have your freedom. Girl about town Betty Cooper. Betty Keller rather. You’ve never been boy crazy like the other girls. Whaddya say?”

“I need to think about it Kevin,” she said, tempted by the opportunity to come and go as she pleased, wear what she wanted, see whomever she liked without interrogation. That was attractive. And really what was she giving up? Intercourse, which she’d never had and so wouldn’t miss. It seemed to make sense. A practical solution to both their problems. She thought about it, imagining the new life in the city that she’d have. What really swung it though was the thought of all those boys being sent to that terrible place to face the most horrible danger. She couldn’t help most of them but she could do this one thing to save her friend. Surely it was her duty to help.

A week later, at her parents’ Christmas Eve party, Kev asked her dad’s permission to marry his daughter. By the end of the night she had a sapphire on her finger. Hal chuckled that he’d always thought that Kevin was “light in the loafers,” and Betty tried to make her laughter at that notion sound genuine. Mr Keller looked at her as if she were a suspect in one of his cases. She smiled and kissed his cheek and asked if she should call him dad now. “Are you sure Betty? Is this really what you want?” he asked, looking uneasy.

“I do. It’s going to be wonderful Mr K...dad.”

They got married on a wet and blustery Saturday in February. Some guests clearly thought that the wedding was indecently expeditious and she felt their judgemental glances linger on her midriff but she didn’t care. She wore the white dress to which she was entitled and Kevin looked handsome in a suit borrowed from the store. After the wedding dinner they changed out of their finery and boarded the train to Grand Central, a married couple, staring determinedly ahead with absolutely no jittery insecurity about the wedding night.

Now months after that rainy wedding day, in the dusty city summer, instead of working as a sub editor in the window of the Register, she was yelling up from the street at the second floor apartment that served as the office of the Eye. “I’ve got copy,” she shouted, in a way that would have made her mother shudder. “You can’t have it unless you’re wearing pants.” Larry came down, more or less dressed, and let her in. He and Terry accepted the 35mm film she handed over. The Eye was produced in a completely new way by collaging the copy and images onto large sheets of paper with rubber cement and a revolutionary disregard for traditional layout. The sheet was then photographed to create a printing plate. Betty had the photographs but not the paper layout so Larry wouldn’t pay her the pittance they’d agreed on. “It got incinerated when the bookstore burned down,” she explained. It wasn’t about the money for her or either of her collaborators but she didn’t want Larry and Terry to know that or they’d never get paid. “I’ll be back for the money next week.”

“If we print it,” cautioned Larry as Terry spluttered over his joint. 

“You’ll print it. It’s dynamite. See you next week. Don’t smoke our fee,” she cautioned as she left, glad to be out of the frowsty, perfumed fug and back in the comparatively fresh air of Cooper Square. She hurried back towards Avenue C, her feet beginning to ache from the unrelenting New York City concrete, but feeling that she was really directing her own life for the first time. 

As Betty contemplated the vicissitudes of fate that had led her to the office of the East Village Eye her partner in crime, Jughead Jones, was riding the subway with his nemesis and wishing that he had had the balls to tell Betty Keller how he felt about her. In his head he was calling himself a chicken, a candyass of the most despicable kind. Unfortunately to make his confession to her he would have to betray a guy who he genuinely liked and she would assume that he was being disloyal to a woman she considered a friend. It was a complete, unholy screw-up. The subway car juddered and creaked and he thought about how, when he lived in the Sunnyside Trailer Park back home in Toledo, he had never had these kinds of moral dilemmas. What happened to Fangs had changed all that.

Everyone at the trailer park knew the moment when Fangs’ grandma got the news. There was a scream and a crash and, when folks stepped out of their trailers to see what the fuss was, there was a Lieutenant Colonel on the step of the Fogarty trailer, holding the old lady up by her arm despite her apparent determination to sink to the floor. Neighbours hurried over to be with her and the Colonel told them that the marines would arrange a military funeral, that it would all be taken care of for her. She wanted to know when her grandson would be coming home, when she could see him and kiss him goodbye and he told her when the transport would arrive but then he asked FP to step outside with him, somehow identifying the authority figure even amongst that ragtag bunch. “It’s a closed casket for this kid. She mustn’t ask for it to be opened. Not under any circumstances,” he cautioned.

Jughead felt sick and guilty. Fangs and Sweetpea had been called up only a few weeks after they graduated in the summer of ’63, while he was still a junior. Pretty much all the young men of the trailer park got the notification at some point. The local draft office either thought they were doing these boys a favour, getting them out of gang life and petty crime, giving them discipline and purpose, or, more likely, they simply considered them expendable. They filled their quotas from the wrong side of the tracks so the clean shaven, respectable young men from good homes could stay home with mom and pop. Jughead was well aware that it was only a matter of time before he received his call up now that he’d graduated too. He registered with Selective Service and was classified “1A available for military service” so then he waited for the induction notice to arrive, not willing to start anything else, filling his time with writing scraps of poetry that he was too ashamed to read to anyone and supplying those respectable boys from the other side of town with grass and, occasionally, acid. Then Uncle Sam sent Sweetpea home, most of him anyway. The missing arm was immediately obvious but there was something broken inside too. He couldn’t meet anyone’s eye, flinched when a screen door slammed and they all heard him scream at night. Jug went and sat with him one afternoon after an especially bad night. “I’m thinking about enlisting Sweet. I feel like a coward sitting here waiting. This has got to be worse than just getting on with it,” he confided.

Sweetpea lunged at him and grabbed his arm with the hand that the army had left him. “Don’t you fucking dare Jones. It’s so much worse that you can imagine. It’s fucking hell and it makes you a devil. You mustn’t go. Say you’re a fairy, say you’re crazy, get put in jail. Anything but, Christ Jones, promise me that you won’t go.”

“But I’m useless here Sweetpea. I feel like there’s no point to anything,”

“You write though. I hear the typewriter all the fucking time when I’m lying awake at night. Write about it. Write about Fangs, about this,” he made a disgusted gesture at where his arm should be. “Make people see that it’s wrong. Promise me.” His eyes blazed with furious intensity and Jug felt himself nodding, making a promise to his friend that he had no idea how to keep. 

Late that night he was at a sticky table at the back of the Whyte Wyrm, the bar frequented by the denizens of the trailer park, with Antoinette who, she informed him, had now decided to go by Toni. They were good buddies who had played doctors and nurses as kids but, once their curiosity had been satisfied, they had seen no reason to repeat the experiment. They knew each other as well as they knew themselves and with greater acceptance. Jughead was recounting his conversation with Sweetpea and, to his surprise, Toni was suddenly sparking with energy and excitement. She rifled through her bag and produced a brightly coloured, stapled sheaf of papers. On the cover were the letters EVE over a shockingly obscene cartoon image. “What’s this?”

Toni explained that her cousin in Harlem had posted it to her, because she thought she might be interested in the photo collages inside. “It’s called the East Village Eye. It’s like a newspaper but it doesn’t have to toe some fascist line. It’s full of stuff the people need to know about the war and about how to stop it. And art and poetry and, god, just everything. Look.” She flicked through pages of cartoons and text until she found a spread of images, photographs of students at a demonstration, Columbia he thought. “I could do that. I have the pictures that I took at Fangs’ wake. They might print them. And I could take some of Sweetpea too. So people can see what they’ve done to him. And there’s poetry in here too, like yours, with all the rhymes in the wrong places. We should go there, to the city, get involved, stop the fucking war man!”

He really dug the passion and he liked the look of the publication, its whole vibe, but one of them had to be practical. “And your uncle’s going to let that happen is he? ‘Hey Uncle Bobbie, I’m taking off to NYC with this weird white guy, and no money, to end the war. See ya in the funny pages.’ That’s going to fly is it? And I’m still going to get drafted any day so then you’ll be there all alone. The big city is no place for a coloured girl who’s about four feet tall on her tippytoes.”

“Fuck you Jones. Ok then, we’ll get married. Then they can’t draft you. Right? And you’ll be my husband so my uncle won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.”

He laughed as if she had told a hilarious joke. “So I’m flattered that my obvious animal magnetism has finally demolished your girlish reserve but we aren’t really into each other are we? We aren’t even dating.”

“It’s true that I’d like you better if you had boobs,” Toni said, reaching across and stroking his hair back from his face affectionately.

“I could say the same about you,” he countered but then she pulled her blouse down a little, a challenge in her eyes, and he put up his hands, “Ok, you do have boobs but they’re in proportion with the rest of you which means they’re like teeny tiny little mosquito bites. If they were bigger you’d fall over, so they’re fine.” 

“Christ enough about the boobs. I know it’s fucked up Jug. We both like girls, your ideal would be some kind of graceful blonde princess, Grace Kelly with her top off, not me, but we’re what each other have. We get married, my uncle backs off, you can’t be drafted, we go to New York and bring down the goddamn government. Whaddya say?”

He thought it sounded like a viable plan and he had nothing in the diary for the next thirty years or so. New York, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, all his heroes, writing like Whitman, living like anything was possible. He wanted that, so he grinned and nodded.

They got a licence in secret and went to the courthouse with Sweetpea and Toni’s pal Peaches as their witnesses. Toni was in a purple minidress and gogo boots and Jug wore jeans and his leather jacket, like everyday. The judge looked at them like the trash they were and Jug grinned at him in a way that was certain to give the old man nightmares. They got back to Sunnyside after they’d said their “I do’s,” waved their marriage certificate in front of anyone who was interested and packed up and took off on Jug’s motorcycle that night, with only what would fit in the panniers. They didn’t even have rings.

What Jughead had entirely failed to plan for was the existence of Betty Keller. He’d had girlfriends of the type that frequented the Whyte Wyrm, girls looking for guys with motorcycles and bad attitudes to confirm their low opinion of themselves but he’d never fallen in love with any of them. He’d tried to be kind to them but they hated that and soon moved on to guys who treated them worse. He never cared because the kind of girl he wanted was the kind he only ever found in books, girls who could use words like Emily Dickinson, girls who would stand by their principles like Jane Eyre, girls who demanded the respect of their men like Beatrice in Much Ado. It wouldn’t hurt if she sat on his desk while he wrote like Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep. If he had anticipated that such a creature actually existed maybe he would have waited before marrying in haste. The kicker was that, if he had, he’d never have met her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The East Village Eye is based on the great countercultural institution, The East Village Other. There is an archive online if you want to check it out.
> 
> Dean Moriarty is a character in Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road. He’s not a good person, he’s the “angel”, “devil”, “Shrouded Traveler”,”Holy Goof”, “Angel of Terror”, the “Soul of Beat.”
> 
> The poem Betty is turned on by is Lenore Kandel’s To Fuck With Love from The Love Book. By 1966 it was being seized as obscene by the forces of law and order, because, of course, female desire is considered obscene whereas male desire is an unstoppable life force. She read at the University of California Poetry Conference in ’64.
> 
> The Twilight where Jug and Betty arrange to meet is based on The Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village (1958-1971) where Ginsberg, Kerouac, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Hugh Romney and Diane di Prima all read.


	2. The World Was Suddenly Rich With Possibility. (Jack Kerouac -On The Road)

As Betty walked away from the East Village Eye on that early summer day, swinging her purse and enjoying the feeling of being gainfully employed, she remembered her first few weeks after arriving in the city and how she had struggled to find purpose. She’d moved into Kevin’s apartment and, in emulation of the ideal of womanhood set by her mother, began to make it homey. She sewed new drapes by hand and made matching throw pillows from the leftover fabric. She got some sad looking pot plants from the market for a few cents and nursed them back to blooming health. Soon the apartment was a welcoming and fragrant oasis. Avenue C was not a desirable address, in fact the area had her pretty rattled a lot of the time, but the apartment was cheap and, she had to admit, there was something thrillingly vibrant about the culture clash of the Lower East Side. Most of their neighbours were Puerto Rican families, Nuyoricans as the kids called themselves. She greeted her neighbours in high school Spanish and tried not to flinch when the doors slammed and pans crashed, she even came to like the Jíbaro songs that drifted up the stairwells. Further along the street there were older orthodox Jewish folks, women in unconvincing wigs and, on Saturdays, even as the weather turned warmer in the bloom of spring, men in the fur hats she learned were called shtreimels. They mostly kept to themselves, speaking Yiddish and using only their own stores. Back in Riverdale almost everyone she knew looked like her. The coloured folks lived on the Southside and went to Southside High for school, so she never met them. She didn’t think of herself as prejudiced, she hated the injustices that befell coloured people every single day, the horror of the newspaper images of innocent marchers being attacked by police in Selma brought her to tears. It seemed incredible that the police would do violence to American citizens in the exercise of their constitutional rights. She was horrified to learn that there were state officials who made it their business to stop people from voting. To her the vote was a sacred pillar of being an American and to be denied it was an act of civic violence. At least now, she thought, it would be set right by the President’s proposed legislation. It was anathema to her that in 1965, so many long years after the civil war, the wounds left by slavery and discrimination were still bleeding. And yet she began to understand that here, in the city, it wasn’t enough to passively hold the correct opinions. She felt ashamed when she realised that her friends were all white and she hadn’t ever managed to be more than polite to her Hispanic neighbours. 

The apartment had been freezing when she moved in but gradually, as the days warmed with the coming of spring, it stifled. There was no way they could afford an air conditioning unit so Betty had spent a lot of time on the roof of the building, reading, watering her vegetable plants, feeding the dirty pigeons. When she could no longer ignore the crushing boredom she began to look around for work to which she could turn her hand. She was headed to the market one afternoon when she noticed that the kosher grocery that had closed down a few weeks ago had been replaced by some other kind of enterprise. Esoteric symbols were spray painted on the outside and a handwritten sign in the window said “Karma Books.” A few days later when she passed, another piece of paper had joined the first. “Help wanted: typist. Enquire within.” She was a competent typist; her mother had insisted on it, saying that a young woman who could type would always be able to make a respectable living. The shop she glimpsed through the window looked disorganised and untidy, more like a junkyard, and she was intimidated by both the shadowy, disordered decor and the smell that emanated from the open door. It was sweet, perfumed, but with a base note of damp leaves and burned rope. She suspected that it might be pot although she couldn’t be sure. “Betty you’re a grown up married woman. You are perfectly capable of going in here and asking for a job. This place needs you,” she whispered to herself. She smoothed down her dress as she pushed the door further open and stepped inside.

A man sat behind the counter holding a hand rolled cigarette. He was handsome but bedraggled. Ash was falling onto the open books on the counter. He wore a ravelled cardigan over a dirty shirt with a frayed collar. His eyeglasses were smeared and greasy and his hair badly needed cutting. Amid the chaos and disorder he was reading a book of poetry. Everything about the scene made her fingers twitch. “Good morning. I’m Elizabeth Keller. I’d like to apply for the position. I can type.” 

The man looked up at her distractedly and squinted over his glasses. “Can you tidy up and make coffee too?”

“Yes, yes I can,” she said, squashing down the urge to tell him that any fool could do those things if they simply made an effort.

“Ok, you’re hired. When can you start?”

“What just like that?”

“Yes. I’ll pay you a dollar seventy five an hour. Five mornings a week. That suit?” He had clearly lost interest in the conversation as he returned his attention to his book.

“Ok. Well I’ll start now. What do you want me to do?”

“See this?” He gestured around himself vaguely.

“What? The store?”

“Yes. Just make it work would you? I think maybe there should be a system. Alphabetical? Or whatever. Colour if you like. Tomorrow I’ll show you the mimeograph and you can get going with that.”

“What do I call you? Sir?”

“Jesus no.” he sounded appalled. “I’m Chipping, Rupert Chipping. You said you were Emily?”

“Elizabeth. I go by Betty.”

“Fine, well thanks Emily. Jump to it. Daylight’s wasting.”

That evening, over chicken a la king, Betty told Kevin all about the store and Rupert Chipping. He smiled indulgently. “Sounds like you’ll be running the place. But stay away from the reefers Betty. No reefer madness here, thanks very much.” He pushed away his plate and stood up. “I’m just going out for a couple of hours. I won’t be too late. No need to wait up. And congratulations!” He kissed her forehead and grabbed his jacket as he left. She didn’t ask him where he was going. She thought there might be a man and she didn’t want him to feel embarrassed. She gathered the plates and went into the kitchen to clean up.

It didn’t take long before she fell in love. Not with Rupert, who was an irritating combination of superior and ineffectual. She fell in love with the store. She had the freedom to arrange it according to her taste and perspective. She loved books and spending all day surrounded by them was heaven. She liked helping the customers, folks learning English, college kids buying and selling books to get through the semester, the local beatniks deep diving into French symbolism and comic books. She began to feel more rooted in the Lower East Side, in the beating heart of Avenue C. She began to look the part too, often wearing denim jeans to more decently clamber up ladders to high bookshelves. When she wore a dress these days it ended three or four inches above her knee rather than two inches below; she liked the freedom and she was aware that her legs drew admiring glances. She began to wear her hair down, held back with a wide headband or a scarf rather than in a tight, constrained ponytail. 

She gleaned that Chipping had been a professor at Columbia until his tenure had been revoked after he had been found bruised and bleeding in a flower bed under the boudoir of the Dean’s eighteen year old daughter in the middle of the night. When his wife found out about this latest in a string of indiscretions, she gave the same treatment to his clothes and belongings, expelling them from the window of their apartment and clearly enjoying the crashing sound of breaking records and the sight of a taxi cab running over his books. So he took out the lease on the shop with an apartment above and decided to be a bookseller-poet despite having no clear idea how to fulfil either of those ambitions. His erstwhile students and his dissolute former colleagues came and sat in the shop all day, getting in the way and staring at her ass, but at least they let her get on with the business of running the store. Rupert had realised very quickly that his talent lay in inspiration not perspiration and he asked Betty to work the afternoons as well and raised her salary to a princely two dollars an hour. She didn’t mention it to Kevin who was on only a dollar eighty.

She organised the stock and priced the volumes realistically. Soon the shop was thriving and, when it was most busy, Rupert would throw wide his arms and declaim, “Welcome acolytes, to the temple of Calliope, Euterpe, Thalia, Polyhymnia and most of all Erato. Fall to your knees and worship here. And while you’re down there…” He could be an absolute creeper but, as Betty reflected, that’s what forty years of never being told “no” will do to a person.

Her happy professional life was in contrast to the feelings she became aware of with regard to her domestic situation. Kevin was as much fun as ever when he was at home but that was increasingly rare. He worked six days a week, returning to eat dinner, after which he would go out again. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all until the next evening. She felt neglected which meant that things between them could be tense. She hated that she seemed to be creating, in her own home, a mimeograph of her parent’s strained marriage. Every day she vowed to try harder but somehow she felt irritable and snappy when she looked at her roommate. She supposed that there was something still missing in her life but she just couldn’t put her finger on what that was.

Still she remembered sadly, she had loved the bookstore and now it was in ashes thanks to Francis DuPont and Bret Weston Wallis. She was determined that the store would be avenged. She would help Rupert to ensure that it arose like a phoenix from the flames. She made a mental note to suggest that as a new name.

While Betty had been settling into a professional niche in the East Village arts scene Jughead and Toni were drifting through the city like flotsam and jetsam, finally coming to rest in Cooper Square, just a few doors down from the offices of the East Village Eye. The first apartment that they tried to rent initiated Jug into a harsh new world that faced interracial couples. He had found the ad in the newspaper and got the subway over from Toni’s cousin’s where they had spent their chaste wedding night. He agreed terms with the landlord and went back to get Toni and their stuff but when they reached the doorstep the landlord stood barring the door in his stained tank top. “You didn’t say she was coloured. We don’t accommodate coloureds.”

Jug took a step forward, his fist already clenched, but Toni held him back. “Jug, we’re leaving.” As they walked away he demanded to know why she hadn’t let him punch the guy. “If you’re going to punch everyone in the nose who discriminates against me you’re going to have a sore hand and nowhere to live. It is what it is. It’s not so bad here, there are parts of the city where folks are more enlightened. If we were in Virginia it’d be against the law for us to even be married. Against God’s law, so that judge said. Come on.”

Eventually they found a place in the old factory on Cooper Square. It was within sight of the Cooper Union where Lincoln had told his audience to have faith in the rightness of the abolition of slavery and that the rightness of the cause would “make might.” Jug hoped that he had been right, despite how things seemed over a century later, when the country still seemed so bitterly divided against itself. The apartment was tiny, a bed, a table and two hard chairs in the main room, a kitchenette with two gas jets and a sink in one corner. They took it because it had its own bathroom with a shower but you couldn’t dress or undress in there because it was so claustrophobic. Ronnie from the apartment next door ran a stall in a warehouse space in St Mark’s Square where she sold old clothes and she floated into their room draped in her Indian silks and declared it miserable. She tempted Toni into her place and told her to pick out things she liked to brighten it up. Toni came back grinning with a Chinese screen and a small lacquered desk. “So we can spare your blushes, Jones,” she said, gesturing towards the screen. “And you can put the damn typewriter on this.” The bed was a problem. They were good friends but there were limits. Jug used a little of their very meagre capital to buy two narrow cots that they could fit into the space. They moved the bed down to the storage area in the basement and he warned Toni not to let Ronnie make any more unscheduled visits to question their chaste sleeping arrangements.

Within a couple of days Toni had found a job waiting tables at The Twilight, a coffee place over on Avenue C. It was an avant garde, bohemian place full of artists and folk singers and, more importantly, as she reported back to Jughead, poets. It could not have been more different from the Hopperesque oases of brightness in the night of the diners and coffee shops in the less countercultural areas of the city. This was a creative space, more interested in feeding the soul and the mind than the body. The walls were covered in loosely tacked fliers and pages from notebooks, political cartoons and obscene sketches, song lyrics and snatches of poetry. In the evenings people could get up on a tiny stage the owner fashioned from an old wooden pallet with just enough space for one person to stand and read or improvise poetry. Sometimes it was a performance with drums or a vocalist, even a dancer. The rumour that Ginsberg sometimes came along drew Jug to the place like a moth to a bare bulb. In the evenings it was full of shadows and whispers, the perfume of grass and incense twining around each other in heady spirals. Some kids sat on the floor, meaning that, as people came in, they had to clamber over their legs and their guitars, birdcages and assorted ephemera. It felt like an intellectual reimagining of the Serpent’s club house. Jug watched from a dark corner, a darker shadow merging into the shade.

The waitressing job wasn’t what Toni deserved but her options were constrained because she was a woman, and a coloured woman at that. She seemed restricted to domestic service in some form. She smiled ruefully at Jug when he protested about the injustice of it, “White folks think black women are terrible mothers, dirty and slutty, but they can’t get enough of hiring us to raise their babies or clean their mess. What’s that about do you think?” 

“Ignorance I guess. Too ignorant to see people for who they are, too ignorant to know that kids need their moms and dads to raise them. Fuck, I need to find work or we’ll be out of cash before the month is over. We can’t both live on a waitress’ salary.”

He went over to The Twilight most days to drink the free coffee she sneaked him and scrutinise the want ads. She thought it was funny that his main skills seemed to be that he was handy with a switchblade or a set of brass knuckles and that his typing speed was seventy five words a minute. “Maybe the mob wants a secretary who can rough folks up,” she laughed one morning as she refilled his cup.

At that moment, from the booth behind him, there was an explosion of oaths and sobbing and a pen was launched, splattering ink as it skittered across the floorboards to land by Jug’s boot. He reached down for it, a gold pen, expensively engraved. He leaned over the back of the booth to pass it back to its owner when he noticed the tears on the young man’s face. “Hey there, you OK?”

“No —fucking Whitman. I have this paper past due. I don’t understand any of it and I’m going to flunk out. Then no more college deferral; I’ll get drafted. Fucking goddamn Whitman is going to literally kill me.”

“OK, calm down. I’ve got you, man. I know my Whitman. What’s the question?”

The guy looked at Jug’s leather jacket curiously but muttered, “Discuss Whitman’s concept of form in Leaves of Grass.”

“Ok, what you got so far? What’s your name?”

“Bill. I don’t even know what form is. I got nothing. I’m an engineer but everyone has to take this fucking literature course.” He showed Jug a page full of doodles, mainly breasts.

Jug raised an eyebrow at Toni who gestured him away to help with a wave of her wrist and went back to her work. He picked up his coffee cup and went and sat next to Bill. “See this is kind of relevant, right? You’ve drawn this chick’s breasts and Whitman would say that’s fine. She’s not her without her body, love her, love her rack, but she’s got a mind too. You’ve left that out. Look, she’s got no head. So he says “Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far” He started to scribble notes and quotations and arrows all over the page. At one point he scribbled a line “And a song make I of the One form’d out of all” and then tried to find the line in Bill’s text, flipping forward and back in the slim volume. “Fuck it, where’s that from?”

“The start of book two, the stanza begins “Dead poets,” a soft voice supplied. He looked up into a pair of large, clear, intelligent green eyes. A girl at the counter had been listening in. His heart thudded and he stared at the eyes for a moment too long before looking back at the book in confusion. He shook his head to let his hair fall over his eyes, hiding, as he flipped to the right page

“Oh yeah, here it is. Thanks.” He felt a bead of sweat run down his spine, his mouth dry. He had no idea what was happening to him so he continued to work through Bill’s paper, occasionally sneaking glances at the owner of the eyes. Speaking of form, he thought. She was remarkably beautiful, her shiny blonde hair held back with a thick headband and she wore a neat blue cardigan over her blouse. And she knew her Whitman. She really was the whole package. He was disappointed when she stood, paid her check and left, carrying a greasy paper bag of take out food. He watched her go until he realised that Bill was looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to continue to scribble. With difficulty he turned his attention back to Whitman and within a few minutes he had managed to become engrossed in the work again. An hour later the paper was finished. Bill just needed to make a fair copy and his prof would be appeased. Jug handed him back the gold pen but he put up his hands. “No you keep it. Thanks so much. You’ve saved my life. I mean literally saved it. Listen, might you be here tomorrow? I have a friend who’s struggling with Melville. He’d be happy to pay you for your time.” Which was how Jughead got into the essay writing game. He sat in the coffee shop and college kids brought him assignments which he wrote with varying degrees of involvement from them. His fee depended on how much they seemed to care about the topic and how much they could afford. None of them seemed to be the wealthy scions he had assumed all students to be, just middle class kids trying to stay out of the war. He had a lot of time for that endeavour and he really liked writing about books.

Looking back now, as the scheme to bring down DuPont reached its climax, it was clear that the essay writing was what had set him on a path that would lead eventually to him fulfilling his promise to Sweetpea. He had found the righteous cause and then Betty had given him the might to carry the project through. He would need her for the battles ahead, he thought, but it seemed impossible to conscript her to his banner; she was too loyal a wife and too staunch a friend to Toni for that.

Betty had to admit to herself, if to no-one else, that she had been in trouble since the first time she had seen him. She had always thought of herself as a cool, dispassionate, maybe even an unemotional person. She could do what needed to be done even if it meant that there would be pain. When Caramel had caught a bird and hurt it but failed to kill it she was able to pick it up and, with a twist, break its neck and end its pain. It upset her, naturally, but she didn’t shirk her duty. When Dilton tried to kiss her in junior year she had, plainly and directly, told him that she would never like him in that way. It would be cruel to pretend that he could hope, to string him along. While she hated having caused him embarrassment and shame, she wouldn’t use that as an excuse to be weak. She had never been ruled by her feelings. That was why she had been able to put aside romantic fantasies and agree to Kevin’s plan for their marriage in the first place. Now, however, she seemed to have turned into some kind of deluded erotomaniac. 

She’d been feverishly aware of him as he sat in a booth alongside the counter at the cafe where she’d been drinking coffee while she waited to collect Rupert’s lunch order. His head was bent over the newspaper while a pretty coloured girl poured him coffee and joked around with him. They seemed well matched, they both had a distinctive, free spirited look. He wore a leather jacket with a snake embroidered on the back, she wore tight purple capri pants and a black lace blouse under her cafe apron. As he leaned forward to circle something on the page, waves of dark hair fell forward into his eyes and he tossed his head impatiently so he could see. For some reason the movement made her heart leap in her chest and she found it hard to tear her eyes away from him. She looked back at her coffee cup in guilty alarm but when he stood a few minutes later, seeming to unfold from the booth endlessly, she couldn’t help but stare. He was much taller than she had anticipated, his limbs angular and slim, all sharp elbows and knees, so unlike her own soft edges. Then he started to talk knowledgeably about Whitman to the young man in the booth he had moved into. She liked his eyebrows, the intelligence and humour in them, although god alone knew how she could discern his character from the inky swoops along his brow. It was unfair that he should be quite so handsome while also knowing so much about her favourite poet. Then he struggled for a reference and she had supplied it before she stopped to consider how wise that was. When he looked up to thank her she couldn’t tear her eyes from his, they were so beautiful and so incisive. He seemed to see into her. The focus was excoriating but not disparaging. He would see who she was, separate from the pretences and performances. She wondered what he would have made of her if he had seen her in the window of the Register, keeping up appearances. She thought he could see that reckless running wild that she longed to indulge. Eventually, when her heart had resumed its customary rhythm and her knees no longer felt like cooked spaghetti, she had picked up Rupert’s lunch and hurried back to the safety of the store. On the way, a new certainty began to cohere, that she had been too hasty and naive before her wedding in her easy dismissal of the importance of the carnal, the corporeal, the fleshy.

Then she seemed to be doomed to see him again and again and, each time, to singularly fail to keep a safe distance from sparks generated by him to light fireworks in her body. He was always in the coffee shop a few doors down from the bookstore, apparently making his living by helping undergrads cheat on their term papers. She wondered why he didn’t use his intelligence for something a little more noble and then reproached herself for that judgement. His occupation wasn’t her business.

Her business was the store. Rupert had picked up a mimeograph machine from somewhere and had decided that he would champion new poets, allowing them access to the machine for just the cost of the stencils and the paper and then selling their pamphlets in the shop. In the Lower East Side, especially the East Village, you couldn’t take two steps in any direction without tripping over a poet or a folk singer so the bookstore was ideally placed. As was to be expected, the floppy haired young men were generally unequipped with any skill that might be considered useful, consequently their typing was so miserable that the mimeograph stencils were wasted in vast quantities. Rupert had decided he needed to hire a typist as his dogsbody and so Betty quickly became a key figure in the poetry economy. While she typed up their lines the poets would sit in the cramped and smelly back office on a straight backed kitchen chair, as nervous as an expectant father outside the maternity ward. Every few words she would pause and ask if they meant to spell “dissappear” like that or if their muse had demanded that they mis-punctuate speech so egregiously. Sometimes they would jut their chins and stand by their artistic choices but mostly they’d grin and ask her to please edit. She read some appalling pornography masquerading as erotica, some depressingly derivative drivel by young men who imagined they were Whitman and, occasionally, some exciting and innovative lines that made her gasp with their insight and originality. 

She suggested to Rupert that she could stop by the poetry events, the “happenings,” at the Twilight and recruit some of the more interesting talents for their project and Rupert agreed enthusiastically before warning her that he wouldn’t pay her for her time. “You can keep any profit we make on the pamphlets though. Choose well.” Betty knew it would be a nickel and dime endeavour but she was excited to be involved, helping young artists get their voices heard, making a contribution to the scene. When, on her first visit to the poetry reading, the pretty waitress had stood to read a poem, glancing at the dark haired essayist defiantly and calling him her old man she had felt a kind of detached acceptance. Of course he had a girlfriend. He had a kind of magnetism that drew her to him independent of her will, how could she expect other women to be immune? The poem seemed authentic and certainly worthy of the attention of the mimeograph so, before she had too carefully examined her motives, she approached and engaged him in conversation. He was a spiky and rather difficult character, ready to be offended, prepared to see every word as a slight. Weirdly, that didn’t put her off him. She was fascinated by his hands, as he lit a cigarette, as he fiddled with the sugar shaker on the table, as he pushed his hair back impatiently. She wanted to touch him, wanted to take one of those long fingers and bring it to her lips. Suddenly she found she wanted him to push it into her mouth, she wanted to swirl her tongue around his knuckle. She was gasping again. Why would she want that? Was she some kind of deviant? Back at work the next day she found a copy of Kinsey’s “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in the store and set it under the counter, her cheeks flaring, she clearly needed to read it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Betty has been following the news from Alabama. There were three marches in 1965 to protest against the disenfranchisement of black voters. The marches were between Selma and Montgomery. State Troopers attacked the protesters on the first two marches, killing and injuring with impunity. On the third occasion the marchers were protected by the Alabama National Guard under federal leadership and by FBI agents. LBJ then introduced the Voting Rights Act to end voting injustice. (Yeah…I know…it was supposed to be fixed in 1965…)
> 
> Karma Books is based on another iconic countercultural institution, the Peace Eye Bookstore on Avenue A in the Lower East Side. The proprietor Ed Sanders pioneered the use of the mimeograph in small batch publishing. He's kind of woven through this fic so he'll be back around.
> 
> Toni refers to a judge in Virginia. She’s talking about the opinion given by Judge Bazile in Commonwealth v. Loving (January 22, 1965). “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
> 
> Jug and Toni live in an apartment on Cooper Square. I am making a nod towards 27 Cooper Square where LeRoi and Hetty Jones lived in the sixties. (See what I did there?) A famous interracial couple in the Beat scene they founded Totem Press there and it was where LeRoi Jones wrote The Dutchman, a play which addresses so many of the concerns of the day about what America really means. It’s a hotel now…:-(


	3. Hear Humanity Amiss in the Sad Plethora of Print (Lawrence Ferlinghetti -Autobiography)

The rear table on the left at the Twilight had become his second home every afternoon. Columbia boys struggling to meet the requirements of the core curriculum turned up with a dogeared “great work of literature” and a haunted look so that Jughead could pull their academic career from the fire for them. Toni combined her duties with the coffee pot with composing a photo series on the life of the coffee shop and its place on Avenue C. Jughead grew accustomed to hearing the flashbulb’s pop or the click and whirr of the shutter. Finally satisfied with the work, she took a selection of eight by tens along to the East Village Eye. When she returned to the Twilight she reported that the editors were a couple of weird guys but they liked her stuff and and paid her for the developing and the film as well as giving her ten dollars and a joint on the understanding that she’d bring them everything she shot before showing it to anyone else. She was going to be published. Jug insisted that they frame the ten dollar bill and put it on their wall despite the fact that they were still hurting for cash. “You’ll be glad to have that as a reminder when you win a Pulitzer,” he told her, a proud arm around her shoulder.

One Wednesday afternoon he was at his usual table when a tall blonde Hitler Youth type strode up and threw down a sheaf of papers on the table in front of him. “Physical love in The Wasteland, three thousand words. I need it this afternoon.”

Jug looked upon at him from his chair and then leaned back in a relaxed slouch. The young man looked at him with an intensity that made Jug unsure if he was about to be struck or kissed. Possibly both. He’d been looked at in that hungry way before but never by a guy. “Well if there’s such a goddamn rush maybe you should have started it sooner,” he said with a smirk that was designed to provoke. This guy was a dick, he clearly thought the rest of the world existed to service his needs.

“It’s not for me, you parasite. It’s for my girl. At Barnard. I really don’t need to bother myself with writing papers. There are some advantages to rank. But you wouldn’t know that would you? I’ll give you twenty dollars.” He was struggling with some strong emotion with relation to Jughead and it was clearly making him furious. 

If it had been an essay for the Siegfried type himself Jug wouldn’t have written it but he thought this girl probably had enough problems without academic probation so he held up long fingers for the money. “Pay first. Trailer park rules apply here, strictly no credit. Come back in a few hours hours. She’ll need to make a fair copy.”

“Fine, leave it by the counter. Tell them it’s for Bret,” and he turned on his heel and stalked out, shoving past the folks by the door. 

Jug turned his attention to the paper as the client departed, “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over,” he muttered, pleased to bring the quotation so easily to mind and by its relevance to the encounter with Bret and his angry, self hating libido.

Later that evening the poetry crowd had drifted in and a guy in a turtle neck sweater was making a low moaning sound in his throat and looking at his feet. The moaning seemed to reach a climax and the guy yelled “If so, Peace,” and stepped off the stage to throw himself onto a couch nearby to a ripple of applause and a few murmured exclamations of “righteous” or “far out.”

From his seat in the deepest darkest corner Jug grinned at Toni, enjoying the ridiculousness of the whole scene. He listened to callow young men reading rip offs of Auden and to older guys in sweaters and blazers whispering dirty poems while they smirked lasciviously at girls who were much too young for them. A woman read a poem that consisted entirely of the titles of comic books which she claimed was about the death of her husband. He thought that his stuff held up pretty well against all of it. There was a moment where he considered reading “Getting Into Knives,” but his moody reserve quickly squashed that idea into oblivion. Then, to his surprise and alarm, Toni took the stage.

“Hey you cool cats. This was written by my old man but he’s too laid back to read it to you himself. Oooh, he’s bummed out with me now. Here’s one of his poems.”

She read them his poem for Sweetpea.

“He’s the guy  
Struggling to pack groceries  
Carrying just one bag  
Holding you up  
With his lost arm

He’s the boy  
Flayed from his momma’s body  
by the sergeant  
Sent home in strips  
Someone else

He’s the guy  
His best girl forgot  
Whose mutilation  
Makes her drop her eyes  
To her softly rounding belly

He’s the fisher king  
He’s the grail  
Do you see him?

He’s the reason  
I won’t go  
hell no.”

It got a pretty good reception although he thought they’d have liked “Knives” better. As Toni was reading he tried to look anywhere but at the stage, feeling his cheeks turning red like he was some shy virgin girl being ogled at a church dance. Then, to his commingled shame and yearning, in the opposite corner he spotted the girl with green eyes, hunched over a notebook, scribbling. At the end of the poem she looked up, catching his glance and inclining her head in a nod of acknowledgement. She stood and made her way over, perching on the edge of the coffee table in front of him. 

“You’re the Whitman guy right?”

“Guilty as charged. I’m Jughead, Jughead Jones.”

“Betty Keller, good to meet you.”

“Were you planning to plagiarise me?” He nodded towards the notebook in her hand.

“No, I was planning to make you an offer. My boss publishes new poetry so I decided to come in and transcribe things that might sell. It’s the karma bookshop just down the street. We’ll print up the things from tonight in a pamphlet if you agree, put them on sale tomorrow. If you’ve got more we can make you a booklet of your own. What do you say?”

“I’m living up to the stereotype of the impoverished poet I’m afraid. No cash to pay for vanity publishing. I can’t believe your boss’ll make any money out of this. Aren’t poets all pretty much broke unless we’re Auden or someone?”

“He’s not looking to make money off you. He’s got this idea of himself as a kind of benefactor of young poets, like Medici or something. He used to be a prof at Columbia so he likes helping new writers. He’s a flake to be honest. Anyway we’ll print you for the cost of the paper but the one I just heard will cover its costs so I won’t need to charge you anything. Do you have more?”

“Just the odd hundred or two. But I don’t know…”

“Look just bring them into the store and I’ll help you choose. If they’re in print it might get picked up by a publisher who’ll actually pay you properly for them. Or would you rather just have your girlfriend read them to strangers in coffee shops for free?”

“Oh Toni’s not my girlfriend,” he began before realising that he couldn’t explain what Toni was without making everything much more complicated. “She’s umm, she’s my wife.” He didn’t like the way this conversation was going and it made him mad with the world.

“Oh…well she did a great job with reading that one. Is she a poet too?”

“No, photographer. She’s got some stuff in the East Village Eye soon. And waitress, obviously.” He really didn’t want to be talking to this girl about his not-wife but somehow that was what was happening. Then with a sickening thud the cartoon anvil fell onto his hopes.

“Yeah, my husband’s an actor who works in menswear. Artists have all got to hustle these days. What’re you doing to pay the rent?” Husband, there it was. While he didn’t believe that marriage was the sacred union the bible claimed he had enough experience of broken homes to recoil from anything that might endanger a secure union. He began to sulk as he replied.

“Still writing papers for college guys. There has to be some payback for going beyond the required reading in high school doesn’t there?”

“Why don’t you just matriculate and write your own papers?”

“Ha, guys like me don’t go to college. No-one wants bums and hobos in the hallowed halls of academia.”

“Well, you aren’t helping put that right by keeping the dummies in college by doing their work. Doesn’t it seem wrong to you?”

“I’m selling them my writing for cash. How’s that different from what you want me to do? If I sell my poems?” he snapped.

Her face set into a neutral expression. “Well fine then. If you don’t want to be published let’s just forget about it. See you round.” She walked back to her place as a girl with greasy hair hanging over her face began an excruciating poem about her failure to orgasm. So that was that, he thought, miserably.

A week later he went back to the Twilight for a poetry night. He’d brought “Knives” in his pocket, wondering if he would actually be needy enough to stand on that stage and beg for the approval of the old perverts and the naive kids. Before he’d made up his mind a tall blonde guy was on the stage. Jug recognised him immediately, Bret, the TS Eliot jerk. He began to read some rambling nonsense about the Bellum Batonianum and burning towers of Illyricum. It was both tedious and offensive, filled with obscure references to Roman history, Latin phrases and tenuous academic comparisons with the war that was currently killing and maiming Jughead’s friends. When he finally sat down, beaming in self delusion at the smattering of polite applause Jug stood up and took to the stage. “Hey, let’s have some real violence shall we?” he said with his trademark sinister grin and read them the knives poem, relishing the slicing and flaying he graphically conveyed in it. When he finished there was a furore of applause and some whoops. 

He went back to his seat as folks stood to pat him on the back but as he passed Bret he heard him say “Bread and circuses.”

Jug turned back, his fist clenched. “Don’t be a sore loser man. You took your shot but your kind of poetry shrivelled, crawled up its own fundament and died at the end of the last century. Rimbaud killed it, probably gave it the clap. It’s not my fault they liked something real better.”

“You white trash…goddamn trailer trash. In what world could you ever best me?” Bret hissed, spittle flying towards Jug’s eyes. Jug took a step forward, raising his fingers in Bret’s face and making the “come on” gesture but then catching Toni’s disapproving glare and thinking better of his clenched right fist.

He looked round the room, improvising with a smile instead, “Best me? Test me, arrest me, but address me as  
sir. Call me  
trash but all you’ll have left  
Is the ash of the world  
your daddy built  
when the East Village  
BURNS.  
IT.  
DOWN.” He knew his audience and they screamed in delight at the radicalism he generously attributed to them. Bret blustered but had no response, neoclassical allusion not lending itself to extemporisation. He looked at Jug with hatred in his eyes and swept out, followed by a girl in knee socks who looked like she’d escaped from a convent school. Secretly Jug wished that the blonde had been there to see it.

His confidence boosted by the good reception at the Twilight, he decided that he would bite the bullet and embrace his fate at the Karma bookstore. If folks liked his poetry it couldn’t hurt to put it out in the world and see what would become of it. He was in the East Village, for god’s sake, which had to be one of the few places in which there actually was currency in verse. Besides it was a way to redress the poor impression he had made on the bookstore girl. He could be friends with her without upsetting her marital applecart. He slunk through the door the next afternoon and saw her shelving books at the top of a ladder. Her skirt was pretty short and he was having an internal battle with himself to keep from looking up at her in a way that would be disrespectful. When she saw it was him she clambered down with a guarded expression. 

“Hello Jones. Have you decided to let me exploit your talent for my own nefarious gain?”

“Yeah, about that. I may have let my paranoia fly a little too free there. Sorry. You still want to print my stuff?”

“With the greatest of pleasure. Don’t suppose you can type?”

“Not a bit,” he lied, smiling.

He sat with Betty Keller in the back room at the Twilight until long after closing time. She read poem after poem and made pretty damn smart comments. He’d written one about his mother which made her cry and there was one about a girl he’d been with that made her cheeks flare while she shuffled the papers nervously. He liked that. He liked it a lot. He let her make a selection and was surprised when she chose the poem that had made her blush. “I didn’t think you liked that one,” he teased gently.

“Oh well, it’s just that you’re here when I read it. If I’d been alone. There’s a poetess called Lenore Kandel…”

“To fuck with love? It’s pretty sexy. What about cummings? Do you know ‘lady, i will touch you with my mind?’” She shook her head and he wondered if she breathed a little faster or if it was his imagination. He looked into her green eyes as he spoke the words of the older poet who said exactly what he felt. “I know it by heart…  
‘Lady I will touch you with my mind  
touch you and touch and touch  
until you give  
me suddenly a smile, shyly obscene

(lady i will  
touch you with my mind.) Touch  
you, that is all,

lightly and you utterly will become  
with infinite care

the poem which i do not write.’” 

Now he thought that he was breathing a little too fast, felt the blush on his own cheek. Maybe he actually couldn’t simply be her friend. She broke the spell with a laugh, standing and brushing down her skirt as if to reassure herself that she was properly clothed.

“Well, time to get on with typing these up. You don’t need to stay, I expect Mrs Jones is waiting dinner on you.”

“Yeah, she’s not really that kind of Mrs Jones.” He smiled at her as she ushered him to the door. There was something between them that he’d never felt before and he wondered if she felt it with Mr K.

So clearly he had always had a thing for her, had always wanted her. He was just going to have to tell her and let the die fall as it would. He had a suspicion that it was a mutual attraction but it seemed so unlikely that she would have any interest in him. Nonetheless if there was the slightest hope he would have to declare himself. Now that their scheme had reached fruition she’d be lost to him if he failed to seize the day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After the conversation with Jones had gone so badly she had avoided the Twilight for a week, hoping to starve what seemed to be a late blooming teenage crush to death with lack of attention. Then he turned up at Karma Books with his sheaf of crumpled poems like Shelley in a leather jacket and, like besotted teenage Mary Godwin, she lost all sense of self determination in a fog of lust. She tried to look at his poems instead of looking at him but that didn’t help at all. As Whitman said, the Form complete was worthier, so his physical presence along with his words was overwhelming. Then he began to recite subtly erotic poetry to her and she was really in trouble. There was an unfamiliar sensation in her belly, a kind of swirling slow awakening like a dragon stirring and beginning to test its fire. She knew that unless she acted quickly, exercised her will, her unclouded rational mind, she would begin to writhe in her chair. She stood abruptly and more or less pushed Jones out of the door, leaning against it once she had closed it and resting her back against it as she struggled to slow her breathing. 

Back at the apartment she decided that she would talk to Kevin. He was a man of the world and he was, technically at least, her husband. He’d be able to counsel her. She waited up for him, sipping cocoa with her feet tucked up under her on the couch wishing they could afford the payments on a tv set. When he got through the door he grinned at her and said “Honey, I’m home.”

“Kev, can we talk? I might have a problem.”

Kevin sat immediately and pulled her feet onto his lap and began to rub them. It was relaxing until she imagined how it would feel if her feet were on Jones’ lap instead and things became dangerous again very quickly. “Tell me all dear wifey.”

“There’s a guy. I can’t seem to stop thinking about him, wanting to do things to him, wanting him to do things to me. I’ve never felt like this before. How can I make it stop?’

“Why the hell would you want it to stop. It’s wonderful..You’re a healthy young woman. Haven’t you…?”

“No, of course not. I’m a virgin Kevin. And I thought I’d stay one. I imagined I was frigid or something. I’ve never been interested. But this guy. I want to…”

“What? Tell me right now. What fantasy is brewing in that amazing brain?”

“I want to suck his fingers. What the hell is that about?”

“Does he have attractive fingers?”

“Oh my God Kevin. So attractive. Kind of long and slender with these big knotty knuckles. Oh dear there I go again. Am I…wrong somehow?”

“Look Betty all I can say is that he would almost certainly lose his mind if you did that. It’s so intimate and it’ll make him think of other acts that might be similar. There’s nothing wrong with you, you might be a kind of sexual savant. Get your guy and suck his fingers and anything else you want to.”

Betty stared at him aghast. “Is that a thing? Is that something people do? Like people who aren’t…professionals?”

“Definitely. I can only speak to a limited demographic honey but guys are guys. If guys like me want it then guys want it. And he could return the favour.”

“What? How could he…I don’t understand. No don’t explain. I can’t give more head space to this stuff. Anyway it doesn’t matter because he’s married. So I can’t suck him anywhere. I just want to stop wanting to.”

“Good lord Betty. When can I meet this man? He sounds amazing.”

“Never. We might have to move. I might need to quit my job. I might need to leave the country and live in Antarctica. Why does this have to happen now? I was perfectly happy without wanting anyone and now I just want to lie on my back every time I see this man.”

Kevin was belly laughing now. “Oh Betty, I love you so much. All hot and bothered for a man and furious about it. It is wonderful for those of us who have always been a slave to our libido. A tonic. All I can suggest is cold showers, regular exercise and a bland diet. That was the only way I survived high school. I was so in lust with Moose Mason that I thought I’d explode. God I wonder where he is now?”

“Da Nang, Archie wrote me he’d seen him in country. They had a beer together. That was a few months ago though. Who knows now?”

They were silent for a moment as they thought about the young men, scared and far from home while they sat safe and cosy in their apartment. Then Kevin remembered Betty’s predicament and laughed and hugged her on the couch. Betty was joyful that she had a friend to push Jones out of her mind. As she lay in her bed that night she had a brilliant idea which she worked into a plan. She needed to make friends with Mrs Jones. Her loyalty would make her feelings for her husband disappear. Jones had said that she was a photographer for EVE, Betty was a journalist by training and inclination. She’d write a story for the newspaper, get Mrs J to take the pictures, they’d bond and she’d stop wanting to crawl all over another woman’s husband.

A few days later Betty was feeling less confident as she was led up a dank staircase to the East Village Eye by a bearded guy in a stained kaftan. She found herself in a disorderly and chaotic apartment instead of a real newspaper office. There were roaches of both types everywhere. There was an unmade bed covered in dirty grey sheets, smeared plates piled everywhere and a dead houseplant on the window ledge. She was torn between rolling her sleeves and starting to clean and running home to shower for a week. When she was offered a seat she perched anxiously on the extreme edge of a couch and held her hands in her lap so that she wouldn’t touch anything.The other so called editor was wearing a bathrobe that, now that he was sitting, was doing a terrible job of protecting his modesty and her blushes. He was wearing some kind of underwear but it was stained, venerable and holy enough to be an object of reverence in a shrine. She averted her eyes as he scratched himself and belched. “So lady. You wanna write for us. Got any experience of the newspaper biz?”

She was pretty sure that she had a great deal more experience than this hippy but she wanted the gig so she gave one of her sweet, insincere smiles. “I grew up in the business. My parents own a newspaper upstate so I’ve copyedited, I’ve set type, delivered papers and written everything from lost dog stories to exposés of the misdoings of the high school football team. I can write and I know what sells. Here, I brought my portfolio.”

“OK I don’t need to look at it. We’ll publish you if you’re any good but we aren’t going to pay you much. You aren’t planning to live off this right?”

“No. I’m a married woman and I have a job at a bookstore. I’ll write in my spare time. I wondered if I could work with a photographer though. Toni Jones? I saw her stuff in last week’s edition. I think we could be a great team.”

“Ok, whatever. I’ve got her address somewhere.”

“No, don’t worry. I know where she works. I’ll stop by and see what we can collaborate on. And you’ll print it right?”

“At this point I got nothing but space and sex ads. You fill a couple of pages and, if you aren’t entirely illiterate, we’ll print it.”

After work at the bookshop the next day she stopped by The Twilight. She was pleased to see that Jughead was not in his customary seat supporting idleness in the student body by doing their work for them. Toni was working so she took a seat in her section. “What’ll it be?” she asked, holding her order pad and looking at Betty with polite enquiry.

“I’d like a mint tea if you have it but I’m really here to see if you want to work with me on a story for the East Village Eye. I loved your photographs of this place. You have a great eye.”

“Thanks. You’re a writer? What did you have in mind?”

“Well I’m not sure. I thought we could talk about what we’re interested in and come up with a story. What do you say? I’ll give you my address. You could come over after work one evening, I’ll make us some dinner…?”

“Sounds like a date,” she laughed.

“Well I guess your husband might have something to say about that,” smiled Betty.

“Oh he’s not that kind of a husband,” Toni replied, echoing what her spouse had said about her. Betty found that she did like her. Her plan was going to work. She would never betray a friend for a man, it just wasn’t how she was built. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bill was back at Jug’s table at the Twilight the next week, asking for help with Hawthorne. “I want to write it Jones but I just don’t know where to start. Apparently I can get a deferment when I graduate if I get a teaching job in a city school. I want to be a good teacher, understand this shit. Can you help me?”

“Why isn’t your prof helping, man?” Jughead wondered why the guy getting paid for this job was too fancy to do it.

“He’s only interested in the rich kids, kids from the Cape or Washington. Diplobrats like Bret Weston Wallis. He flunks the rest of us out for the least thing and doesn’t even ask for term papers from them. My pal says he wants to get into politics so he’s putting all these important families under obligations to him. He can say ‘Oh your son should have flunked out and been drafted but I saved him.’ Rumour is that he’s pals with the New York National Guard Commander and once you’re in the Guard you can’t be drafted. I heard he has a doctor on the pay roll who’ll say you’ve got some bullshit medical condition to get you reclassified, bone spurs, or some total pile of crap. But only if your daddy is a congressman or a millionaire or whatever.”

“So he’s sending ordinary kids to Nam and building corrupt political capital by keeping kids with bread out of the draft? And he wants to get into politics? What’s he called?”

“Dupont. Francis Dupont. Guys say he’s going to be the new Dean when the current square retires in the summer. First step on the ladder I guess.”

Jughead sat with Bill talking about the May-Pole of Merry Mount and gesturing around them to illustrate how the story might be playing out in the East Village, pointing out the guys with long hair and the girls wearing bright floral dresses. “But given your readership you might want to be cautious in your condemnation of the Puritans. Like these guys here, it can’t all be about the music and the grass and the free love can it? For our lives to mean anything we have to have some values too. We don’t want to fight some futile fucking war in some place we never heard of til Walter Cronkite started talking about it but it’s not enough to get out of going. We have to try to stop anyone from going. It can’t be ‘Hell no I won’t go,’ anymore, it has to be ‘Hell no we won’t go.’ Right?’

“Right on man! But what can we do to stop it?”

“We investigate slime balls like Dupont messing with the draft and sending ordinary guys to do what the rich won’t let their boys do.” At last Jughead felt like he could do something. If he could pin down this crooked professor, get people understanding what was going on then he could build on that sense of outrage, maybe it would be a movement. Back at the apartment he found Toni changing for a dinner date with Betty Keller. She said they were going to talk about a story they might collaborate on for the EVE so he told her about Bill. When the universe threw synchronicity your way it seemed obtuse to disregard it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jughead quotes from The Wasteland - the terrible, depressing sex scene in The Fire Sermon. 
> 
> An L7 is a square. If you make a square with your fingers you’ll see why.
> 
> If so Peace is the last line of a poem called Living with Chris by Ted Berigan
> 
> The comic book poem is The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books by Alice Notley (This is anachronistic but the late husband was Ted Berigan whose poem I reference above)
> 
> ee cummings actually wrote a lot of quite subtle erotic poetry. It seems to get ignored.


	4. All America Hung on a Hook and Burned By Men in their Own Praise. (Gary Snyder -Myths and Texts)

As Toni and Jughead were scheming in Cooper Square, Betty had been rushing home from work at the bookstore laden with groceries, as excited as she would have been for a date. This was the first time she had entertained a friend in her own home, the first chance to show off the homely touches she had made to the apartment, to offer her guest food and wine like a real grown up. She dragged the fondue set that Fred and Mary Andrews had given them as a wedding present from its box under her bed and began to set it up. She had remembered to buy French bread the day before so it would be stale enough to cut into cubes. She had splurged on imported Italian salsiccia and she cooked some cubes of potato to disguise how little meat there was. She couldn’t justify the expense of imported cheese so she was shredding Colby but by the time she’d added wine and mustard she didn’t think her guest would tell the difference. She melted some of the cheese, changed into a cute but comfortable swing dress, and stared hopelessly at the scant resources of the record collection. She thought Toni would be too cool to appreciate Roy Orbison or Del Shannon. She had Dinah Washington out of the sleeve before she thought that her new friend might be offended that she had selected the only LP in the apartment by a black singer so she replaced it. Eventually she chose West Side Story from Kevin’s end of the shelf and turned the volume low so that she would hear when Toni yelled up to the open window as she had asked her to. 

When the call eventually came from the street it was not however Toni’s melodic voice but a much deeper one. She ran to the window and looked out. There he was, with his wife, on the sidewalk, looking up. “Hey there Mrs K. Toni said she thought it’d be OK if I crashed the party but if it’s a girls’ night I’ll make myself scarce.”

She was about to tell him to do just that when Toni called up. “He’s got a lead on a story. I thought it made sense for him to explain it to both of us at once. Is it ok?” There was no way she could turn him away without betraying herself. She had no alternative but to welcome him into her home, summoning an absolute determination not to lust over him in front of his wife. 

“Yes, of course,” she called down, “the more the merrier. Here, I’ll throw down the key. Apartment 6B.” She bundled the key inside the clean sock that Kevin left on the window ledge for this very purpose and threw it underarm down into the street. Toni plucked it out of the air, her husband letting her, looking a little sheepish.

Toni laughed and yelled, “He’s a poet. He’s all about the mind, so not a jock. Can’t catch to save his life. What a guy huh?”

Betty managed not to comment but she did wonder about the health of the Jones marriage as they let themselves in and made their way upstairs. 

She welcomed her guests into the apartment and poured wine for Toni. Jughead accepted one of Kevin’s beers but then nursed it for over an hour, barely taking a sip. They'd been chatting about a photographer that Toni had met through her cousin in Harlem who was making images of black women for fashion shoots. “It's just not something I've ever seen. The magazines and the advertisements hide us, lighten us, tell us we aren't beautiful. This guy is trying to change all that, make a new aesthetic. I've been talking to Ronnie, she lives next door to us, about making some photographs of her designs, using models who look like me rather than just like, well, like you Betty.” Their talk was interrupted by Betty’s purported husband making an appearance. He looked at their guests with some curiosity before throwing himself into an armchair and joining in the conversation. She stared at him, confused by this sudden interest in domesticity. “I fixed you a plate dear,” she said meaningfully, “It's in the oven. Pork chop, I thought you’d be going out.”

“No, I don’t have to go anywhere. I’ll have a nice night in, good food, interesting company, what could be better? And the white elephant wedding gift fondue set. I never thought I’d see it in use.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Betty said, trying to sound enthusiastic, while she wondered how to stretch fondue for two to a full dinner party for four. How had she gotten into this situation? Her best friend and the man she wanted to be intimate with in the same room — and of course she had to be married to the wrong one. Now she was going to make small talk with the guy who’d been sauntering through her dreams like Mr Darcy in Levis while concealing her drooling from his charming, amiable wife. “Well I just need to prepare a few things. Why don’t you entertain our guests Kevin, sweetheart?”

“Sure, I’ll just wash my hands and change. Excuse me for a moment won’t you?”

She was cutting more bread, grating more cheese and pouring herself a second, larger glass of wine when Kevin snuck into the kitchen behind her. “That’s him isn’t it? The sexy hands guy? I’m right aren’t I? Why did you invite his wife? Is this about to get kinky?”

“No, of course not,” she hissed. “I only invited her but he tagged along. What was I supposed to say? No sorry, no fondue for you because I’m too hot and bothered by you to watch you eat melted cheese? Anyway he apparently has a story idea for the East Village Eye so maybe the evening can be salvaged. Now get out there, be Mademoiselle magazine’s ideal husband and I’ll be in when I’ve stopped having an attack of the vapours.”

It was actually a fun evening. Her guests had never eaten fondue so she explained how to skewer a morsel of food and cover it in the molten cheese before transferring it to their plate and cautioned them not to eat from the fondue fork if they wanted to escape serious oral burns. If she’d know Jughead would be coming she wouldn’t have served something which so prominently showed off his beautiful hands as he twirled the long fork in the melted cheese. Toni was funny and feisty and took no nonsense from anyone. Kevin was always good value as a conversationalist. Betty and Jughead were naturally more reserved but when he started to outline what he had learned about the nefarious dealings of Professor Dupont she was quickly firing questions at him and making notes. “So he’s putting these boys in fear of their lives because he won’t do his job and he thinks that entitles him to get into government. And letting rich kids pass courses that they have no right to pass. That’s outrageous. What can we do? Who’s our source?”

“Well there’s this kid, Bill. But he’s struggling already and he’s just a sophomore. If you quote him Dupont’ll flunk him and then we’ll have sent him to Nam just as much as Dupont or LBJ. There’s another guy that I’d like to take down too but we’d have to be sneaky to get him.” Jughead went on to tell them about Bret as one of the benefactors of Dupont’s leniency. “He’s pretty pleased with himself, I don’t know how we could get him to talk. Maybe we could get something from his girl. She seems a timid little thing in knee socks, her name’s Donna. She goes to Barnard. Realistically, of course, even if we expose him I’m pretty sure his daddy’ll have some dentist just waiting to put retainers on his teeth.” Betty must have looked confused because he explained, “You can’t pass the physical if you have retainers. Didn’t you know that?”

Betty glared at Kevin who shrugged. “No Jughead, that’s news to me. Because you used to have braces didn’t you Kevin?” There was an awkward moment of silence before Betty gathered up the dirty plates and bustled out to the kitchen. When she heard a sound behind her she expected it to be Toni, offering to help, but it was Mr Jones instead. 

“Shall I wash? Toni spends all day dealing with dirty plates so I do my share when she’s not at work,” he explained, blushing a little.

“Oh, sure. If you don’t mind.” Kevin had never washed a pot since their wedding.

He looked over at her through the defence of the dark curls that always fell forward. “I’ve had a good time tonight. I’m not the most sociable guy but this has been really nice. I guess I must be old now. Dinner parties are our scene, not crazy parties.”

“Well I was never allowed to go to those. My parents were pretty strict when I was growing up. If I wasn’t married I’d be living at home now with a ten p.m curfew. It's ironic that my life got much more exciting once I’d settled down with Kevin.”

“Were you two dating for years? High school sweethearts?”

“No, actually we barely dated at all. He moved away to the city and decided that he…well he needed me, I guess you could say. So he came home and proposed. What abut you and Toni?”

“We grew up together. In a trailer park in Ohio. Our childhoods were total clusterfucks, oh I’m sorry. I mean it was kind of a rough time for both of us so we were good pals. Still are.”

“Well that’s good. A happy marriage needs that foundation I guess. That’s what lasts, after…well, that’s important.”

“Yes. I guess you’re right. And you’re happy are you? In the city, married, working?”

“Yes, of course. What else could I possibly want? Right? Like you and Toni.”

“Yeah, of course. What else could we want?” It was strange that it felt like there was something unsaid hanging between them but he looked down at the suds and began to scrape at a plate with some violence and the feeling soaked away.

By the time the Joneses left, taking an extra slice of Betty’s homemade pie for Jughead’s breakfast in a way that proved their bohemian credentials to the Kellers, they had hashed out the beginning of a plan to get some evidence against Dupont. They weren’t entirely sure how they could take down Bret but they’d worry about that later. That night Betty, as had become her habit, lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, trying desperately to get Jughead Jones out of her mind. When she closed her eyes she could see the disarrangement of the wavy dark hair that he pushed impatiently back from his eyes with those goddamn fingers. She couldn’t help it; she was imagining those fingers teasingly playing with the button of her nightdress, his blue eyes looking into hers with sly insouciance. “Would you like me to loosen these?” he’d whisper, raising one of those saturnine curved eyebrows and she would gasp and nod and push her breast forward so his knuckle grazed her there. He’d smile because he would know what she wanted better than she knew herself. She wanted him to put his hands on her, on her breasts, between her legs, grasping and thrusting against her. Her hips bucked involuntarily as she thought of it. She’d read that women could bring themselves relief but she’d studied some psychology in high school and that kind of behaviour was spoken of as a mental disorder. She’d also read that it could give women cancer of the womb. She’d never dared try herself, but she’d never felt the urge that ran through her now. She wondered if he was making love to Toni right now. They were still newlyweds so she supposed he was. She knew the mechanics of the act, he’d see his wife unclothed and he’d become aroused. She’d lie down and he’d position himself and thrust into her until he reached his release, his slim olive hips moving against her perfect, warm skin. It had always sounded like a humiliating experience but now she imagined a man’s weight between her thighs, pushing himself at her and she found she was panting and soundlessly sobbing with longing. How would she survive if she always felt like this? She had imagined she would die unclaimed, untouched but now that idea made her want to scream in frustration and horror. She rubbed the tears from her eyelashes angrily. She would work harder, throw herself into the bookshop and the article. She would take all of this pent up sexual energy and direct it at a noble end instead of the shameful desire for another woman’s husband.

Toni and Jughead were not making love. She was changing for bed while he ate the pie that was supposed to have been breakfast. Toni looked around the Chinese screen and shook her head. 

“What?” he said indignantly. “I’m hungry. Bread and wet cheese does not a meal make, not for me anyway.”

“Well she was feasting her eyes on you not the food, heartbreaker,” laughed his wife.

“What do you mean?”

“Get real Jug. You must have seen how she looked at you. The girl is way into you.”

“You’re crazy. Did you see the husband? He was like a movie star, all broad shoulders and spiffy duds. I'm a scarecrow compared to him.”

“Well yeah but the dude’s not so much for girls so he’s not digging what she’s putting out.”

“How the hell would you know that? Did she tell you something?”

“No, she was acting the loyal wifey but if you made a move you’d be peeling her off you.”

“Well I’m not breaking up her happy home because you have some weird hunch. Speaking of happy homes, what’s the deal with you and Ronnie?”

“Might be something. Might be nothing. I’ll let you know when I do. That ok?"

“It’s fine. She seems great— and conveniently located. I’m going to hit the rack. Night Toni.”

“Night loverman.”

The next day Jughead stopped by the Karma Bookshop to begin to put the DuPont plan into action and to check on the sales of his slim pamphlet of poems, both pleased and a little shocked to find he had made a few dollars on the deal. Betty handed over the cash and told him that the knives poem was getting him a bit of a reputation as a Kerouac kind of guy. He blushed at the compliment and she seemed to lose the thread of what she was saying. He wondered if maybe Toni had a point. They moved onto discussing the plan. “I asked Rupert. He said he’s happy to help. I’m not sure how noble his motives are but that’s not really our concern. Come on through, he’s in the back,” Betty said, leading the way. Chipping was lying on a couch in the back office looking rumpled and dissolute. He seemed to be pretty lit for ten in the morning but Jug was not unaccustomed to dealing with guys who were under the influence.

“Hi Prof, thanks for agreeing to help us,” he said, taking the upright chair next to the desk.

“Glad to be of service to the fourth estate young man, especially if it fucks over DuPont. What an asshole that guy is. Anyway the cost of democracy is constant vigilance and all that shit,” he slurred. Jug brought out a notebook and began to scribble Rupert’s advice for a young man making an application to Columbia. When it seemed like the older man’s avuncular energies were deserting him Jug got to the real heart of the matter. 

“See the problem is that I graduated from a pretty terrible high school. I did ok, got good grades but Columbia’s never going to be interested in some guy from nowhere Ohio.”

“Ah well that’s where I can really help,” Rupert smiled slyly. “Before I held aloft the blue and white I taught at a prep school, a pretty good one actually. The headmaster’s secretary is a …” he had the decency to flush a little as he searched for the right words, “a dear intimate friend. If I explain the situation she’ll send them a reference and a transcript that I’ll supply. You’ll have graduated exceptionally well from Stonewall Prep not Hoodlum High. By the time anyone checks you’ll have brought justice down on Columbia and Dupont and no-one is going to care how you achieved it.

Jughead duly applied to be a Columbia man. He could tell that Betty was jealous that he got this role in their scheme but until hell froze over and Columbia admitted coeds Jug was the only realistic candidate to seek admission so that Columbia’s motto, In Thy light shall we see light, could be made more than an empty platitude. 

A couple of weeks later he received an invitation to meet with a faculty member for an interview. They had been canny that long afternoon in the Twilight when they wrote his admission essay, focusing all their attention on the obnoxious, reactionary literacy preferences of Francis Dupont. It had hurt Jug to write warmly of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and ‘Journey to The End of Night’ but it had the desired effect and Mr Forsythe Pendleton Jones III was requested to report to the study of Professor Dupont for his grilling. Betty had stared at him in shock when he had filled in the application form with his given name. “Are you making that up to try and impress them?” she’d asked, confused.

“No, it pains me to say that it’s the god’s honest truth. As Kurtz says ‘The horror, the horror.’ Can you imagine when the teacher called that monstrosity out in homeroom on my first day of high school? That’s why I’m a fighter. It put an indelible ‘Kick Me’ label on my back. Fight or die.”

“Well it makes going by Jughead more understandable I guess,” she smiled. He liked making her smile. Toni huffed and raised her eyebrows as she brought them coffee and Betty looked mortified. 

The next hurdle was what the hell he would wear. There was no way that preppy Stonewall alum Forsythe would turn up in leather and denim. When he told Betty of the snag she said “Can’t you wear your wedding suit?” and Jughead gestured down his body to indicate that he was wearing it. “You got married in that!” she shrieked in amazement. “What did Toni wear?”

“Can’t honestly remember. Probably something purple.” Betty looked stunned that the groom had forgotten or even failed to observe what his beloved had worn for that most momentous day and he noticed that she was especially kind to Toni when she came and sat with them during her break. She clearly thought he was the absolute pits as a husband. He guessed he was. 

Still she was prepared to help. “I don’t think we can put you in anything of Kevin’s. You’re pretty much the same height but you’re very slim.” He knew she meant lanky, gawky, a scarecrow. “Besides his clothes are more…”

“Flamboyant?” said Toni pertly.

“Exactly,” agreed Betty, appearing to miss the implication of Toni’s words. “I bet Rupert has something appropriate for a serious scholar. I’ll ask him. Come by the shop tomorrow. He lives above so if he agrees we can take a look then.”

He reported to the store as required and put on the clothes that Betty and Rupert had selected for him, a tweed coat, formal shirt and slacks. He tried to protest about the tie but was overruled by both Betty and Rupert. He comforted himself that at least it was narrow and plain grey. When he had changed, in Rupert’s disorderly and frankly grubby apartment, he slouched downstairs and stood for inspection. The jacket was heavy, itchy and a little loose, the trousers were pleated in the front and hung from his skinny frame so he felt like he was wearing a potato sack. He hated the feeling of the tie, constricting his throat uncomfortably. He was embarrassed to be scrutinised but then he watched her look at him, her eyes sweeping up his body to his eyes and smiling. She seemed to catch herself and change her expression to one of wry amusement but there had been something else, something appreciative. He recognised it because he knew that it was his expression whenever he looked at her. “This is going to be the best I can do,” he muttered embarrassed.

“You’ll fit right in. Remember what Wilde said ‘You can never be overdressed or overeducated.’” Rupert patted him on the back encouragingly.

“Well then, I guess I’m ready to enter the belly of the beast.”

The interview was, strangely enough, a congenial experience. He was playing a role but he got to sit in a professor’s rooms and discuss literature for an hour. The professor was a terrible human being and living proof that Jughead’s previous view that literature was a machine for the generation of empathy had been naïve but he was smart and the cut and thrust of debate was stimulating. They discussed the truth of Melville’s assertion that the whale was not a symbol at length. Jughead took the view that the writer need not be the final authority on the meaning of a work. “We wouldn’t expect a writer to be the expert on the value of their oeuvre so why should we think they understand what they have made? Reading can be a creative act, can’t it?” he opined. DuPont disagreed but seemed to enjoy the way that Jug framed his argument. 

“Stonewall prep eh?” he said, looking over the sheaf of papers on his desk. “It’s obvious that you’ve been properly educated. You’re exactly the kind of young man that Columbia is seeking out. Tell me a little about your father.”

Jug had expected that this would come up and had prepared a useful lie. “Father was killed in the last war. My grandfather helped raise me. He’s in publishing. I suppose that’s why my interest is mainly in literature. He’s rich as Croesus and he’s desperate to keep me out of the current …unpleasantness. I’ve been travelling since I graduated last summer which is why I’m applying so late but now he says I need to buckle down unless I want to join the National Guard or something. Which I don’t.”

“Quite. Well I’m sure that we can find a place for a promising young man of your calibre even so late in the day. I’ll take your form out to the secretaries and then I’ll walk you out. Just wait here a moment.”

It was the chance that Jughead had been waiting for. As Dupont left the room he moved around the desk, trying the drawers — locked. He reached inside Chipping’s jacket and pulled out his folding knife, sliding it along the mechanism, finding the spring bolt and pushing it down so he could slide out the drawer. Student files, perfect. He rifled through, quickly finding Bret’s. He grabbed that along with a couple of others at random. Turning, he was relieved to see that the window was already open. He peered down to the lawn two floors below, spying Betty being pestered by upperclassmen as she waited below. How had he imagined that a girl like her could go unremarked on a men’s campus? He gave his sharp whistle and she looked up in time to catch the files that he threw down having first rolled them and secured them with the rubber band he had brought for that very purpose. He’d been prepared to try to get the evidence out down the back of the voluminous pants but it would have been riskier and more uncomfortable. At that moment the door opened and Dupont reentered. “Just imagining strolling on those lawns next semester sir,” said Jug turning with what he hoped was an innocent smile. 

Dupont clapped him on the back, “We look forward to it my boy. Don’t forget to sign up for my Pope course; it generally fills up fast.”

After meeting up with his co-conspirator and taking the subway back to the Lower East Side, Jug and Betty went to the bookshop to look over their spoils. They weren’t disappointed. If Dupont had wanted to implicate himself in blackmail, extortion and fraud it would have been hard for him to compile a more thorough document than Bret Weston Wallis’ file. There was a letter on paper headed with “The Office of the US Ambassador to the Court of St James,” and signed by Theodore Haslett Weston Wallis. “Bret’s father is the US ambassador to Great Britain. He really is a diplobrat,” muttered Betty. 

The letter thanked DuPont for his interest in Bret’s academic progress and assured Professor DuPont of the ambassador’s gratitude and best wishes. The key line was towards the end of the letter. “We hope that my son will go on to achieve great things in the political sphere and we are grateful for the assistance which you are able to give him in facilitating his degree. (Lam 3:64)”. Jug glanced at Betty to see if she knew the verse but she shrugged and reached behind her for a King James Bible, navigating to Lamentations much more speedily than he would have managed. 

“Render unto them a recompense, O Lord, according to the work of their hands,” she read. “But I guess DuPont is expecting the ambassador to render the recompense rather than trusting to the lord, right?”

“You bet he is,” Jug replied bitterly. “I just can’t imagine what it must be like, folks smoothing your way the whole time. It’s not surprising I guess that he’s such a square. He knows The Man’s always got his back; Christ his dad **is** The Man.”

“No, don’t let him off the hook so easily Jug. I had it all growing up, the white picket fence, mom’s apple pie, the whole deal, but I can still see that things are terribly wrong. Everything needs to change, like Dylan says ‘The order is rapidly fading and the first one now will later be last,’” He joined in as she recited the last line, delighted that she knew the lyric as well as him, “for the times they are a-changing.”

“He’s a poet Betty. As much of a genius as Sartre or Steinbeck or Hemingway, they should give him the goddamn Nobel Prize. And it really doesn’t matter if he plays acoustic or electric or the goddamn spoons.” 

She laughed, “Well he’s more of a poet than a singer that’s for sure.”

The other files were similarly incriminating. Theodore Weisel’s included a handwritten note that he had graduated summa cum laude in 1959. The note was stapled to a letter from Amory Edsel Weisel on paper headed Weisel Private Investment Bank, 23 Wall Street New York, which informed Mr DuPont that Theodore’s father and grandfather had both graduated with Latin Honours and that the family would be disappointed if Theodore did not maintain the tradition. The older Weisel was happy to “do anything within his power” to ensure that that happened and wondered if the department would benefit from an endowment of twenty thousand dollars to create an extra professorship in the department, perhaps to specialise in Pope or Chaucer, two fields in which Mr DuPont had a special interest. “So that’s why he’s a professor. He owes it all to lies and cheating. There was some ordinary kid who should have had the honours that year and Weisel gets it because his daddy can sign a check for twenty grand and not even blink. We have to bring this down. It just can’t go on.”

Jonathan Berkeley’s file contained one of his graded essays. It read like it had been written by a fourth grader. Jug read aloud, “Apparently ‘Moby Dick is too long and only a longshoreman or a pirate or something would enjoy it,” and “people only read this shit to say they’ve read this shit but in the end it’s just a dumb story about a big fish and who cares about that?’”

“Look he has got a point but DuPont’s given him a B for this. That can’t be right. Is there a letter for him too?” Betty asked.

Jug was holding a small square of paper inscribed “Buffalo 1924.” “No letter. Photograph.” He turned it so that she could look at it and she paled as she understood what she was seeing. There were a group of men in white robes. Some of them wore their pointed hoods, others held them by their sides. In the front row stood a young man who could only be Francis DuPont. Behind them a building with a square, ornately decorated facade and in one man’s hand a large wooden cross. There was a torn envelope in the file, on the front were the words “Please find herewith my final essay for this course along with a snapshot of the Calumet Building in Buffalo. I thought you might find this picture of interest in the current political climate. I have several others. Jonathan Berkeley.”

“And these were randomly chosen Betty. What the hell else is in that drawer? He can’t carry on. Let’s write this thing up shall we? I’ll get Toni to go onto campus and get some shots tomorrow.”

Over the next few evenings they sat in the back office at the bookstore arguing about structure, correcting each other’s grammar and having more fun than Jug could ever remember. Partly it was the feeling of being on the right side at last. He’d felt morally compromised so much of the time back home, always in a terrible grey area of ethical ambiguity. To be convinced of the nobility of this cause was cleansing and he relished that. Then there was the writing itself. He enjoyed the ease with which the words came when there was a clear message to be conveyed, it was exhilarating. Finally there was her. She was beautiful and he liked to look at her but she was also so smart and seemed to know what he was thinking before he had framed the idea in his own mind. She wouldn’t let him get away with anything. When a thought wasn’t entirely cogent he sometimes hid the vagueness under prolixity and periphrasis but Betty would grab a pencil and strike through his excessive verbiage, scribbling a question mark so he’d have to clarify the thought. He appreciated the challenge. She made him a better writer— maybe she made him a better person. He was having the time of his life. Which made it even more of a shame when he almost got them both killed.

They’d been putting the finishing touches to the article when Betty started to wince as she stretched her sore fingers, aching after pounding at the keys for hours. “Jump up and let me take a turn,” he said.

“Not if you’re going to be scratching out over and over Jug. It’ll be a mess,” she protested but he inclined his head toward her insistently so, reluctantly, she stood and let him take the seat. When he sat and proceeded to touch type twice as fast as she had been managing, she reached over and smacked him upside the head in indignation. “You said you couldn’t type! You scoundrel.”

“I wanted to watch you type my words,” he said in an unguarded moment before he realised the strange intimacy of what he had admitted and blushed scarlet. She cleared her throat and turned back to the paperwork as if she hadn’t heard. It was a slip but he couldn’t be sorry. He wanted her to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The door key wrapped in a sock and thrown out of the window is a reference to Ginsberg’s practice when he lived in the East Village.
> 
> The photog that Toni has met is Kwame Braithwaite, generally credited with the start of the Black is Beautiful movement in 1962.
> 
> Mademoiselle Magazine was actually more creative and radical than one might imagine. As well as giving Plath the summer that she writes about in The Bell Jar and publishing short stories by so many great writers, they published an article by Burroughs and kept their readers well informed about Ginsberg and Kerouac.
> 
> The thing about the retainers still holds true.
> 
> “Clusterfuck” was coined by Ed Sanders in the 60s (See note above on Peace Eye Bookstore)
> 
> Attitudes to female masturbation were changing but I imagine that Betty grew up with Kellogg’s idea that it caused cancer and the greasy of Freud’s idea that any clitoral stimulation was a symptom of psychological degeneracy which was still prevalent through the 1950s.
> 
> The first fully coeducational intake to Columbia was 1983.
> 
> Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand 1957
> 
> Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1932
> 
> Jughead, in his interview, anticipates the publication of Barthes 1967 essay The Death of the Author but it was an idea which was in the DNA of the New Criticism that had been a dominant force in lit crit from the 1940s. If you have been reading the cut ups of Burroughs et al you would be thinking along broadly those lines. Barthes gave it a name.
> 
> Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2016
> 
> I make a reference to electric Dylan, a controversy which began with the release of Bringing It All Back Home in March of 65 and rumbled on through that summer. I mention it as an homage to the great Fred Andrews.
> 
> There really was a big Klan presence in Buffalo in the 1920s.


	5. Angelheaded Hipsters Burning for the Ancient Heavenly Connection to the Starry Dynamo in the Machinery of Night  (Allen Ginsberg -Howl)

The article was finally finished at nine that evening and they decided to stop by the Twilight, say hi to Toni and see if anyone was reading that night. When they walked in, however, the first person they saw was Bret. “Oh Christ, tell me he isn’t threatening us with more of the endless dirge about that first century Roman war,” Jughead moaned. They took seats in his normal dark hideaway at the back of the venue and she whispered that it sounded terrible. Jughead had said it was execrable, loathsome, abominable and egregious. “Bad then?” Betty had asked, unable to resist a smile at his loquacity when he was normally so taciturn in speech.

“Such terrible shit. Really, the absolute worst.”

“Well I can’t wait,” she grinned.

“You won’t say that when you’ve heard it. It exists merely to demonstrate his expensive preppy education and is completely devoid of any attempt to communicate feeling or share experience.”

“And that’s what poetry is for?”

“Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”

“Wow, that’s beautiful,” she said, a little surprised.

“Ah, not mine I’m afraid. Paul Engle said it.” Betty must have shown that she was unfamiliar with the name because he elaborated. “He’s a poet. He’s the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I had a dream once that I could go to college, join the Writer’s Workshop. Be a big success. But that’s not meant for kids from trailer parks. It’s for the guys with the dirt on professors or ambassador daddies. Anyway I just scribble to myself, out here alone in the wilds of the East Village.”

“But college isn’t impossible for you if you want it. You could make it happen.”

“Maybe my idea of success is a little different now. If I can get to twenty six and out of the draft age with all my limbs attached that’d be a pretty big achievement. And the best success would be to save other kids from being sent to some fucking stupid vanity war. Excuse my French.”

“No, you’re right. We ought to be standing up for each other, standing together. It’s like I was saying before about my picket fence childhood. Growing up everyone I knew was like me or at least was pretending to be. I didn’t really know anyone who was different. No offence but I’d never met anyone who grew up in a trailer, I really didn’t know any coloured people, anyone not just exactly the same. And I was a bit scared when I came here, scared of the Puerto Ricans in our building, of the Jewish families on the block, nervous about offending them by being ignorant or just scared for no reason. But now I think that understanding all the different types of people is actually what this country is supposed to be about. We’re supposed to be about letting everyone be free, free to worship who you want, how you want, free to eat empanadillas or rugelach or whatever the hell you like, free to speak Yiddish or English or Spanish or Spanglish. The kids down the hall call Avenue C “Loisaida” because when folks say Lower East Side that’s what they hear. That’s richness and humour and just …life, isn’t it?”

He was looking at her intensely as she spoke and for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her but then he shot a glance over his shoulder as Bret stood up and brought out a depressingly thick sheaf of papers. There, at his table, sat the girl with the knee socks. “Hey Jug, do you think she’s ok? Might she need help?” Jughead was startled. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might actually be in danger but Bret was clearly unstoppably committed to Bret Weston Wallis. He might be hard to break up with.

“I don’t know. Maybe you could talk to her? She might want in on the story.”

Betty left Jughead’s table and sidled over to sit with the girl. “Hey are you Bret’s girlfriend?” She looked at Betty with a Giaconda smile and nodded, “Donna,” she whispered.

“I’m Betty. I work at the Karma Bookstore just across the street. We publish local poets. Do you think your boyfriend might be interested?” She too kept her voice low because Bret had begin to assault them with his dreadful doggerel.

“Oh I don’t know.” Donna hissed in reply. “I think he’d rather have a real publisher. His dad knows a guy at Faber in London where Eliot worked, TS Eliot,” she clarified as if Betty might not have heard of him. “It’s more or less like being published by God. He’ll be famous in no time once he graduates next year.”

“Well unless he’s drafted. Always a worry once there’s no more college deferral isn’t it? Or I guess you could get married?”

“Marriage is a holy sacrament. It isn’t something to be entered into lightly or wantonly. Anyway they wouldn’t draft Bret. The draft’s as much about cleaning the dirt off the streets here as it is about the spread of Communism there.” It was an outrageous suggestion and one that Betty very much hoped was a sick fantasy but then she thought of the middle aged, middle class, white politicians and generals sending boys who were almost all poor or coloured to Nam to die in foxholes she wondered if maybe Donna didn’t have a point. Could an American government actually be so evil as to sacrifice its own citizens to political expediency and ambition? To lie to the population about a threat to make violence seem acceptable? She very much hoped not. It was increasingly clear that this girl was smart and callous, a daunting adversary and not a victim at all.

“Well he’s certainly a catch,” Betty said, subtly removing her wedding ring under the table. “I wish I could find a man like that, with prospects.”

“Yes he has a great future ahead of him. The aim is to be a senator by 34. JFK was 35. Then the White House. But I assumed you were an item with the hobo back there.”

Betty laughed, “The White House. He’s ambitious —or you are? And Jones is married to the waitress. That’s her over there.”

“Oh an interracial couple. That’s as good an argument as you’ll see for anti miscegenation laws. The scum breeding with the coloureds. There’ll be a tide of degenerates that’ll eat away at American values.” Betty tried to control the nausea that swept over her. There were very personal reasons that she didn’t want to think about Jughead and Toni’s babies but she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that they would be beautiful, sensitive, glorious creations. And those children, that family, would surely be a perfect expression of the American ideal, folks drawn by a common goal regardless of their differences, living and loving in harmony. They’d be rich with all the culture of both of their parents’ heritage and then make their own, new story. But Donna wanted to obliterate anyone who didn’t fit her cookie cutter ideas of what was acceptable. She reminded Betty of her mother, if her mother had been spliced with Eva Braun in some evil Nazi experiment. 

“No, not with Jones. I was just talking to him about his poems. He’s got a pamphlet on sale in the store. I need someone who’s going places, someone who can provide for me, who I can be a help mate to. How do I get someone like Bret?”

“Well you should have gone to college. You aren’t going to meet the leaders of tomorrow on Avenue C. Anyway I want to listen now. If you’ll excuse me.” She turned to give her full attention to her boyfriend’s terrible reading and Betty walked away, her hand itching with the desire to slap her hard.

She sat back down at Jughead’s table. “Well she’s a sick puppy.” He quirked an eyebrow at her and the lust flooded back so she rifled through her purse for a cigarette that she wasn’t interested in smoking just to turn off the headlamp intensity of his eyes. “She thinks the war is like social Chlorox. She thinks Bret is immune from the draft, oh, and she thinks he’s going to be published by Faber and become President.” He sputtered with laughter as he leaned forward to light her cigarette and his nearness made her cough a little in confusion. “I don’t know why I took it up really. I don’t like it at all. It’s supposed to help you slim.”

“You don’t need to slim. You’re beautiful,” he said and then flushed and sputtered, “Christ, I’m sorry, that was so dumb. Pretend I didn’t say that. I wouldn’t want to disrespect Kevin.”

“Or Toni,” she reproached him.

“Or Toni,” he murmured quietly.

“Anyway she’s no delicate violet. I suspect she’s the power behind the throne, Lady Macbeth. She’s got this reactionary weltanschaum that makes me wonder if he just goes along with what everyone else plans for him.”

“I’m glad it was you talking to her not me. I wouldn’t have gotten anything from her. Social niceties aren’t my strongest suite. I bet you were one of those popular girls in high school. They always hated me.”

“I was too much of a good girl to be really popular. I can play the part but I hate it. And her. And is Bret’s rotten poem ever going to end?” Eventually it seemed to peter out more than actually reach a climax. Bret strode across as the smattering of embarrassed polite applause died away.

“Nothing to read? Blocked are we?” he sneered.

Jug leaned back in the chair as if he were stretching. “If only you were blocked Bret. We wouldn’t have to endure any more militaristic crap. It’s not a good look is it? Not for a guy who wants to be commander in chief?”

“What are you talking about, you degenerate?”

“Well, when I publish my evidence that you dodged the draft and then people compare your cowardice with the bombast of your writing I don’t think anyone would vote for you to be an officer in your Lodge of the Elks or Moose, or whatever the hell secret society your daddy expects you to join, let alone to occupy the oval office.”

“Like you could prove any such thing.”

Jughead smiled at Bret’s increasingly red face. “You’d be surprised what I can prove. I never reveal my copy ahead of publication. You’ll have to buy the East Village Eye. The cool things is it’s syndicated so the story will get everywhere.”

“It’s a rag, a gossip sheet. No-one will take anything it says seriously.”

“To misquote Churchill, gossip travels round the world before dry old news gets its boots on. And what’s more, once it’s in print all the other papers can get hold of it on microfiche forever. Every time you wangle a nomination or stand for office there it’ll be. They’ll remember that you’re the guy who said he believed in the war but wouldn’t fight himself.”

Bret now looked pale instead of flushed. He scuttled back to Donna who inclined her head towards him listening intently.

"I shouldn’t have done that should I? I shouldn’t have warned him,” Jug mumbled.

“Well, you’ve put a target on your back. Better take care crossing the street for a few days,” Betty smiled. She didn’t understand how prescient her words were.

The next evening Jughead ambled into the bookstore just as it was closing. “I’m sure I saw Bret on the street just now. Maybe he’s going to read more of that terrible poem tonight. I’m going to stay away. I’ve got an idea about the story.”

Jug had been talking to Terry and Larry, the guys who put together EVE in their attic apartment. He knew how they were printing it using a collage technique with scissors, rubber adhesive and pages of copy. “I think we can make it more interesting than just standard pages of newsprint. Toni gave me her pics so let’s get gluing.”

They laid out the story over four pages, paying no attention to the pagination. It would be a poster, a manifesto, a graphic work that folks could pin on a wall or paste up in a window. Toni had supplied images of the Columbia library with students reclining on the lawns but she also had a clear shot of DuPont in a lecture theatre, arms outstretched in declamatory style to accompany the image of him as a Klansman. That would put paid to his political ambitions. Surely Americans would never vote for an openly racist candidate. Then there was a shot of Bret reading his poem surrounded by a yawning and uninterested audience. It formed a humorous and incisive comment on the kind of unjustified self confidence that DuPont and his prodigy shared. By the time they had laid out the whole piece they both felt excited by their creation. It was something that felt new and experimental. Toni had lent Jughead her camera to photograph the whole layout and Terry at the Eye would use the photographs to make the plates from which the issue would be printed once the back page sex ads and the only slightly coded invitations to buy narcotics were added.

As Jughead took the pictures, Betty decided that a celebratory drink was in order and, knowing that Rupert kept a bottle of rye whisky under the cash register, went down the corridor and opened the door to the store. It was as if she had opened a portal to hell. The store was ablaze. Piles of books were catching fire as sparks from loose pages and pamphlets drifted onto nearby volumes. Now the door was open she could hear the crackle of dry paper and feel the heat on her cheeks. All of those books aflame, the tears that sprang to her eyes were not only a consequence of the smoke that began to drift towards her. Then she felt absolute panic. The street door was on the other side of the growing inferno, unreachable. She ran back to the office, slamming the doors as she went. “Jughead, the store’s on fire. Really on fire,” she gasped.

“Can we get out?”

“Not that way. There’s a window in the bathroom. Small but possible. Onto the alleyway.”

The window in the bathroom was both higher and smaller than it had seemed in her recollection and she stopped for a beat and stared at it. “Ladies first,” he said and interlaced his fingers to make a step for her to use to clamber onto the basin. As she stepped up she was imagining her mother lecturing her about how her current predicament showed that a skirt that ended four inches above her knee was both immodest and impractical. She certainly wished that she had been wearing bluejeans. 

“Jug, can you turn around please?” she whispered and he flushed and turned his back as she wriggled her head and shoulders out of the window. There was a dumpster underneath which was fortunate since she could perform an inelegant handstand rather than nose diving onto the ground. With a wriggle she dragged her hips out of the window and collapsed onto the ground beside the dumpster. Jughead must have heard the thud that accompanied her fall as his head appeared through the window seconds later. He seemed to surge through like a snake, long arms, shoulders, torso, slim hips, long legs that seemed to keep emerging for far too long. Eventually he emulated her collapse and lay on the floor a little dazed. There was a brief sound of footsteps and he jumped to his feet and took off down the alleyway in a loping sprint. Betty stared after him, bewildered, until she heard the unmistakable sound of fist on bone at the end of the alley. There was a yell followed by what sounded like sobbing. She ran to the end of the dark tunnel between high buildings and found him standing over Bret, who was sitting on the ground, his hand to his face. 

“You broke by fugging dose,” Bret moaned.

“I’ll break your fucking neck. Did you do that, you facist?” Jug gestured down the street towards the burning store.

“Doh,” Bret mumbled.

Jughead turned to Betty. “I’ll deal with him. You better go call the fire department. There’s a phone at the Twilight. Oh fuck! Rupert!” Jughead turned as if he were planning to go back through the bathroom window but Betty had a better idea. 

“I’ll get Rupert. You take care of our friend here.” She ran down the street to the Twilight, yelling at Toni that the store was on fire and they needed the fire department and then gathered up the odd assortment of tweaked out and stoned customers that remained, lingering over coffee and cigarettes. “Quick, come with me. You get to save a guy’s life.”

Once they were in the street outside the store Betty was horrified by the extent of the blaze, clearly visible behind the plate glass store windows. She screamed up at Rupert’s window, the others joining in. “Rupert,” they chorused like carollers in hell. Nothing happened. Fortuitously there was a pile of rubble from a demolition in a vacant lot nearby. Betty swiped a half brick, took a step back and, remembering her years of pitching to Archie to help him practise for his Little League games, launched it at his window. The aim was true but the glass didn’t break. She settled her mind, the rocker step, the pivot, the leg lift, the stride and the release remembering with a smile how her mother had sent her to her room without supper when she learned that she had been pitching baseballs. She launched another half brick against the glass, striking the window perfectly, shattering it with a deafening crash. The implosion was followed by the emergence of Rupert’s tousled head. “What the hell is going on?” He yelled.

“The store’s on fire. Can you get downstairs?” Betty yelled. He paled and then disappeared from the window, returning a second later, coughing violently. 

“No. The stairs are well alight. There’s so much smoke.”

“You’ll need to jump. Throw down a blanket. We’ll catch you.” He looked even more frightened at that suggestion than he had at the realisation that he was trapped in a burning building. Still he threw down a stained grey blanket and Betty encouraged the coffee shop gawkers to grab the edges and pull it taut at chest height. “Aim for the middle Rupert. Jump!”

“How the hell does this keep happening to me?” Rupert whined as he stepped out of his window and off the sill into the void. There was a sickening crack as he landed in the blanket but, when he sat up cradling his elbow, Betty felt confident that it was a collar bone rather than anything more life altering. As they lowered Rupert to the ground, flames began to lick out of the window from which he had so recently jumped and the sound of sirens became audible in the distance. Betty ran back round the building to the alleyway hoping that Jughead had not unleashed the full ferocity of his anger on Bret. 

“Hey Betty. Is he Ok?” Jughead said as she approached, Bret still on the ground at his feet. She winked surreptitiously as she replied.

“Looks like he won’t make it,” she replied, managing a tearful little catch in her voice for added authenticity and pathos.

“Oh Bret. Arson and murder. The Big House not the White House. Whatever will the ambassador say?” Jughead gloated. Bet looked as terrified as a person can when their nose is flattened all over one half of their face. 

“Tell us what happened Bret. This doesn’t seem like your style at all.”

Bret was crying pathetically now. I told DuPont that you had something on us, that I was worried. He checked his files and found that things were missing and we put it together. He said we’d both be in trouble unless I got rid of the evidence. He’d be fired and I’d be expelled because I had no authentic grades on file. He told me what to do. I was just following orders. I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. I didn’t know anyone lived in that rats’ nest. Just let me go. I’ll do anything you want.”

“You have to confess. You can either come clean with the police about this little bonfire or you can testify to the dean about DuPont’s schemes.”

“I can’t. I’ll be expelled.”

“Yeah, you will. But you won’t be in jail will you? Choose right now.”

Bret chose expulsion over incarceration. Which was why Jughead had to accompany Bret to Columbia once he had assured himself that Betty was unscathed after her interview with the cops. He escorted him to the office of the Dean and sat with him while he tearfully recounted his tale, explaining exactly how he had been manipulated and exploited by DuPont and that his grades were a tissue of lies. While he spoke his “friend” Mr Jones sat by him, prompting and encouraging him, reminding him that he would feel so much “freer” if he made a clean breast of things. The Dean thanked him for his honesty but told him that the scale of the deception was such that the university had no alternative but to ask him to remove himself at once. Bret was out, as he had anticipated, but it was only as Jughead left him at the corner of the lawn with a cheery “Good luck soldier,” that he seemed to realise that he was now eligible for the draft.

As arranged he set out to meet Betty at the Twilight the next morning to get each other caught up with the fallout from the week’s events. He saw her waiting at the corner of the street as he turned onto Avenue C from seventh. She wore a short, flared yellow summer dress and long tan boots. Her hair was held back from her face by a yellow headscarf. She looked like the freshest, most glorious sunflower, blooming there on the grimy street. Nothing dirty could besmirch her, she floated over it all. His heart leapt. He couldn’t conceal his grin as he approached. 

“Is Bret all done?” she asked when he was in earshot over the traffic and honking horns.

“Expelled. I guess they’ll fire DuPont. Bret told them where he keeps his evidence. Rupert said he was coming over to you when I took Bret yesterday. He still there?”

“Still asleep on my couch. He’s fine. He says he’ll look for a new store. Try again. He did have the stock insured so he can do it.”

“What a team we are, partner,” Jughead smiled.

She nodded and returned his smile, hers was radiant, beautiful. He hesitated but then her eyes flickered down to his lips. She wanted this, he could tell she did. He leaned in and put his mouth on hers, running his tongue over her bottom lip. She leaned into him, her foot raised behind her as she pressed against him, his hands against her hips, her hand on his jaw, a delicious sigh in her throat. When the long haired kids talked about nirvana they said it was perfect peace, complete acceptance of the reality of all things, a loss of self in everything that is. He understood that now. And then, harshly, brutally, she was tearing herself away from him, stepping back, her face angry and hurt. “What the hell Jones? You’ve got a wife. You can’t go about kissing random women when the urge takes you. Think about Toni.”

“I…I’m not sorry. I want you. I’m falling in love with you. Toni doesn’t mind. Are you still in love with Kevin or do you feel anything for me? We could start again…together.”

She stared at him for a long, agonising minute and then, coldly, she said, “I’m in love with my husband. You’re in love with your wife. It’ll be better if we don’t meet again. Goodbye Jughead.” So that was that. He’d tried and failed and now she despised him. He’d betrayed her and Kevin and he despised himself and the fate that had brought her to him too late. As Ginsberg had it “the weight, the weight we carry is love.” He turned back to Cooper Square shouldering the burden of his solitude and guilt.

When she got back to apartment 6B Betty slammed the door, threw herself onto her bed and cried. She hadn’t expected him to kiss her but when he did she wanted him to kiss her forever. She’d withstood the challenge so she should feel proud, vindicated, righteous but she didn’t. She felt like a traitor, a collaborator.

After an hour or so there was a hesitant knocking at the bedroom door. She’d completely forgotten about Rupert. “Mrs Keller? Betty?”

She went to the door, wiping her face with a towel. “I’m sorry Rupert. What must you think of me? Too much excitement I’m afraid.”

“I’d like to think I know you a little better than that Betty,” Rupert said with a slight smile. “If you’re weeping then you have a good cause. Can I do anything to help?”

“No. I’ve made my bed and now I will have to lie in it I’m afraid. I have been a stupid girl and I’m making everyone thoroughly miserable. It’s time to buck my ideas up. Now, would you like some hot tea?”

“I’d like a drink. I think you would too. What do you have?”

By the time Kevin came home there was an empty wine bottle on the coffee table and another in the trash and both Betty and Rupert were giggling softly about nothing at all in the living room. “What’s all this? Daytime drinking? What gives?” he asked, looking from one to the other.

“A man made a pass at your wife today Mr Keller,” said Rupert, only slurring a little. He hadn’t been shocked or surprised when Betty had explained her domestic arrangement and had been nothing but sympathetic to her moral scruples regarding another woman’s husband.

“Oh that’s great. The poet right? Why the hell are you here Betty? Shouldn’t you be letting him show you his odes or something? Getting all tangled up in his pentameter?”

“I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean Kevin. And in case it’s slipped your mind, he’s a married man.” Betty hiccupped softly and then giggled.

“And you’re a married woman. I certainly hope you aren’t going to let that stand in your way. Maybe he and Mrs Jones have an arrangement. Some folks do. We do. Anyway it’s his marriage, surely that’s for him to worry about?”

“Hardly Kevin. I’m not a home wrecker. So I told him that I wouldn’t see him anymore and now I’m getting drunk because I’m two thirds in love with him and it turns out he’s a rake, a cad, a bounder.”

“OK Jane Austen. I’ll go and buy more wine. I had some good news today. I got a part!”

It took a week to evict Rupert from their couch but eventually his wife, generously, agreed that he could stay on her couch until he found somewhere more appropriate. Kevin was spending much of his time with “a friend” in Little Italy. The apartment was empty, Betty had no job until Rupert found premises to try again with the bookstore and she couldn’t risk stopping by either the Twilight or EVE in case she ran into Jughead Jones and made a scene either by slapping him or kissing him in front of his wife. Weeks passed, the weather getting hotter, the four walls of the apartment becoming more and more oppressive in the summer heat. She cooked and cleaned and read and wandered the streets, window shopping. EVE was published and she bought ten copies, sending one home to her parents and one to Polly, wondering who would want to see the others. She put them under her bed in a grocery bag. She was entirely miserable. And she was mad. The investigation and writing their story was the most fulfilled and happy she had ever been. Why had he had to go and ruin it by wanting more? It made her furious with him. One afternoon she got up from the couch where she had been reading Frank O Hara’s Lunch Poems and wondering as he did “if one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me.” She fetched herself a glass of water and went back to the couch to see that a note had been shoved under the door with her name on the envelope in his distinctive sloping, spidery, black handwriting.

Betty  
I know you’ve been hiding out, avoiding me. Don’t. I’ll stay away from the Twilight and from EVE. I can’t bear the not-seeing-you in all the places that you aren’t. You looked like a sunflower that day. 

I didn’t know what it meant til then...  
love.

J

She didn’t mean to but she ran into the hallway in time to see no-one on the stair just like in the children’s rhyme. She ran back into the apartment and looked out of the window. There he was, swinging a long leg over a motorcycle and kicking it into life. She struggled with the window for a moment, pushing the sash up and leaning out to yell “Jughead, Jug!” but the engine drowned her out and he was gone without a backward glance. As she stood there she wondered what she would have said if he had looked up, if he had turned and come back up the stairs. There were no words. She would have fallen into his arms and been whatever he wanted. She would have been Anna Karenina, foreseeing her own destruction but unable to struggle against it, Tess Durbeyfield unable to live unless he loved her, Cathy, on the moor, who couldn’t be separated even by death from the man she loved…And then she laughed, a short, harsh, impatient sound that she had heard her mother make a thousand times. “What nonsense Elizabeth. Do you think you’re some romantic heroine, too full of feeling for the world? If you are, you’re Bertha Rochester. Pull yourself together this second,” she chided herself inside her head. She had loved him but she hadn’t gone to him. Late that night, still sitting by the window she wondered about wickedness. Was she wrong to deny them both the happiness they could have had together? It felt like a sin but to have had that happiness at the expense of Toni was worse surely? She’d work. She’d call up Rupert and offer to find new premises, she’d resume her life without him in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Paul Engle says that beautiful thing about poetry in an article for the New York Times in 1957. The article is available online.
> 
> Avenue C between 14th and Houston Streets was officially designated Loisaida Ave in 1987 reflecting the local usage. 
> 
> “the weight, the weight we carry is love” is by Allen Ginsberg in a poem called A Song
> 
> The Frank O Hara line that Betty is thinking about comes from Personal Poem


	6. The Fleeing Lovers On The Grecian Urn (Lawrence Ferlinghetti -I am Waiting)

Jughead was lonely. He heard Toni laughing next door, heard her camera shutter clicking, heard her moaning softly in the early mornings but he only ever saw her on the stairs. She was always wearing something different assembled from Ronnie Lodge’s emporium and she seemed to glow with love and fulfilment. He tried not to be jealous. He was making a meagre living writing articles about poetry, reviewing books for the Village Voice and writing vituperative anti war pieces for ‘Fuck You.’ Heartbreak was at least good for his writing. He typed all day and then scribbled in longhand at night because Ronnie banged on the wall and threatened to break his fingers if he didn’t stop with the tapping all night. He yelled back that he understood she needed her sleep so she could fuck his wife. There was a silence and then he heard them spluttering and giggling and he couldn’t prevent himself from joining in, it was such a ridiculous situation. He haunted Avenue C. Once he got as far as the apartment door but he chickened out, leaving a note promising to stay away from places she might want to go. He read the East Village Eye when it came out and was pleased with the article. He stopped by the Columbia Campus and picked up the last Columbia Daily Spectator of the semester, smiling at the report that “for urgent family reasons Professor DuPont has regretfully tendered his resignation with immediate effect,” as well the article about three ex-students having their degrees invalidated for academic dishonesty, among the names were Theodore Weisel and Jonathan Berkeley. Jughead very much wanted Betty to know that their story had made a difference but she’d told him to stay away from her. He kept the articles, battling the temptation to go to her using them as an excuse to see her. 

One evening Toni and Ronnie showed up with grass and wine and matching take-charge attitudes. “You can’t live like this Jones. She looks miserable whenever I see her. Let me tell her that I’ve met someone else. Hell she’s already met Ronnie, she just hasn’t put it together,” Toni pleaded.

“It won’t matter. She’s in love with Kevin. She told me. I have to stay away and get over it,” he said, willing the tears that he felt welling up not to fall.

“But mi querido, you aren’t getting over it are you? You’re sitting here brooding and typing out your heartbreak. You need to do something to break the ties if you can’t steal her away,” Ronnie insisted and Jughead had to agree that she was right. He found the articles that he had wanted to give to Betty and decided he would take them to the clothing store where Kevin worked. He could deliver the information via her husband and then he wouldn’t have the thought of going to her maggotting about in his mind all the fucking time. 

He rode over to 7th Avenue the next day at five thirty, hoping to catch Keller after the store closed. As he lounged in the street against the bike, he saw Kevin turn the store sign to read “Closed” and lock the store but he didn’t seem in a hurry to leave. A young guy with long hair crossed the street and rapped sharply at the door and Kevin opened up for him and let him inside. Jughead guessed Kevin had arranged to go for a drink with a pal. He’d go over, drop off the papers and leave them to their evening, although if he’d had the fortune to have a wife like Betty waiting on him there’d be no way he’d spend his evening with some guy instead of home with her. He crossed the street and approached the door but as he raised his fist to knock he saw Kevin and his pal standing inside. They were obviously more than pals. Kevin was embracing the young man, his fingers in his collar length dark hair, the guy had his lips at Kevin’s neck. Jughead stared in disbelief for a moment. Toni had been right. He turned on his heel and walked sharply away but Kevin must have seen the movement and he was immediately at the open door yelling after Jughead, “Jughead, it’s not what you think. Come back. Let me explain,” Jug had no intention of being sold some half-assed line. Kevin was betraying his wife while she was so fiercely loyal to him that she was wrecking her life and his. He was incandescent with rage. He turned on his heel and stalked back to where Kevin was standing outside the store, his hands outstretched in a silent appeal. Without a word Jug pulled back his fist and punched the conciliatory smile right off his square jawed, movie star face. Kevin fell backwards and his friend knelt over him as Jughead threw his leg over the saddle of the bike and rode away. He didn’t feel guilty. Kevin’s deception was so complete. Not only was he being unfaithful to Betty but it wasn’t even, by the look of it, a battle she had any chance of winning. Surely he must have known that he liked guys before they married. Could he even be a real husband to her? His attempt to cut the ties had backfired spectacularly. Now he had even more reason to go to her, to tell her why her marriage was over, to comfort her. He couldn’t do that knowing that his motive wasn’t to be her friend. If he had gone it would have been selfish. He would be inflicting pain on her to pursue his own fulfilment. But not to tell her was unthinkable. 

He went home, iced his fist and stared at the walls, paralysed by indecision. He rode over there more than once, always hurrying away before he saw her. He’d promised. Weeks passed, the weather getting warmer, the four walls of the apartment becoming more and more oppressive in the summer heat. He lay on his cot in a vest and his undershorts, walking to the typewriter sporadically to type a line and then laying down again under the window. One afternoon, trying not to hear Ronnie and Toni sighing and crying out next door, he turned on the radio news report. The announcer was explaining that LBJ had, that afternoon, signed an amendment to the Selective Service Regulations, the draft. Jug listened more carefully turning up the volume knob. “This order will formally eliminate deferments for childless men who are married after August 26, 1965.” Jug glanced at the paper calendar tacked to the kitchen wall. August 26th. So if you weren’t already married there was no deferment for you. Within minutes Toni was at the door. “You heard about the draft? That was close wasn’t it?”

“I don’t think it’s over,” he replied. “They need more guys. They’re sending more every month. It’s not going to be enough. If they can send married guys it’s only a matter of time before they send guys who were married before today. They’ll extend it again.”

Toni looked worried. “What can we do?”

“Well if my daddy was rich I could get one of his golfing buddies to get me into the national guard or diagnose me with flat feet, I could stick a pencil in my ear and burst an eardrum, I could pretend to be crazy.”

“No need to pretend. You’re pretty crazy,” said Ronnie, appearing in the doorway in a chiffon robe with marabou trim like a bird of paradise in their dingy hallway.

“I’ll just have to take my chances I guess. I heard about some guys from home who lit out for Canada. Wouldn’t be able to come back though and I haven’t heard of a big Canadian poetry scene.” He’d told them about what had happened with Kevin at the store and asked if they thought he should tell Betty. Toni said that she was sure she already knew, that it wasn’t the kind of thing a smart girl would miss. He had to agree. But if she wasn’t turning him down out of loyalty to her husband then he had to suppose she just didn’t want him. He had clearly got his signals mixed.

He saw her completely by chance. She was in the window of Ratner’s Dairy, eating blintzes like a real bona fide New Yorker, no trace of the naive small town girl left. He stared for a moment until she turned and saw him, eyes widening in surprise, a smile starting to bloom until she remembered she was mad at him. She was with a man who was not Kevin. Long dark hair over his collar, a Mediterranean look. Jug felt a hot pang of jealousy before he turned and began to stride away. He hadn’t gone more than a few steps when he felt a hand on his shoulder. “Hey man, wait a second.” He whirled round to find the man holding up both hands and taking a step back. “Hey cool down. Don’t start your swinging again. Kevin might have a glass jaw but you’ll find me a tougher proposition.” 

That was when he recognised Kevin’s friend from the store. His face must have shown his confusion. “Look, you’ve got it all wrong. Come back, drink a cup of coffee with us and I’ll explain. But take care. She’s pretty mad at you. I’m Joaquin by the way.” Jug hesitated, uncomfortable, but simply unable to pass up the chance to sit near her even for the time it took to drink a coffee. He might never get the chance again.

“Oh look it’s the Louisville Slugger,” she remarked caustically as he joined her at the table in the window. “Did you imagine you were making the world safe for straight folks or do you beat up anyone who isn’t just like you?”

Jug glanced at Joaquin to try to gauge what Betty knew about the situation but he simply smiled beatifically and watched Jughead flounder. “It wasn’t that. Not at all. Look, will you tell me what’s going on?”

She lowered her voice and leaned in. “Kevin’s my best friend. He was worried he’d be drafted. We decided to get married to keep him out of that. Just in time as it seems now. I knew he had a boyfriend. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

“But if he’s…a…I mean,” Jughead looked nervously at Joaquin who grinned even wider at his discomfort. “…if he’s homosexual he wouldn’t be drafted anyway.” 

“Oh man, you’re too innocent,” said Joaquin. “If you say you’re gay the sergeant gets his cock out and tells you to blow him. Sorry Betty, I apologise. Anyway, if you refuse you’re drafted. If you do it, you’re probably drafted anyway. And then they try to beat the fairy out of you.”

Jug looked at him in total shock and then at Betty to see how she had reacted to that graphic statement. She giggled at his flushed cheeks and wide eyes. “Oh you’re shocked. Poor little lamb. Don’t worry about me, I live in Loisaida. You can’t imagine the things I’ve heard. Anyway, you don’t need to beat anyone up on my behalf thanks very much, especially not my dearest pals.”

Jug looked uncomfortably at Joaquin and shuffled in his seat. Joaquin smiled. “I’m getting strong ‘blow this scene’ vibes from you Jones. Is that ok Betty? You alright if I leave you with Cassius, oh I beg his pardon, with Muhammad here?”

“Yeah, he’s a pussy cat. Give Kev a kiss for me.” She stood and leaned across the table to kiss Joaquin’s cheek as he gathered his jacket and prepared to leave. 

Jughead looked at her and decided it was time to cut through the Gordian knot they had tied for themselves. “Look I don’t expect it matters but Toni and I, we’re like you and Kevin.” Now she did look shocked.

“You’re homosexual?”

“No,” he yelled, drawing disapproving glances from the nice Jewish families around them. “No. Toni and I got married so she could get away from her folks and I could get out of the draft. We wanted to try to stop the war. She has a girlfriend.”

“Oh my God. You mean you and she aren’t… an item?”

“No. There’s only one girl I want.” She gazed into his eyes, searching to see if he spoke the truth. He stared back unflinchingly.

“I think we need to get out of here,” she murmured with a glance at their fellow diners. He looked at the plate in front of her. Three blintzes remained, soft and yielding, glossy blackberries dripping down the sides of the mound. He raised an eyebrow, she nodded and he shovelled two of them down in the blink of an eye, sucking the blackberry juice from his fingers and wondering why she made a moaning sound in her throat. He picked up the last one and held it to her lips, feeling a little dizzy with lust, and she smiled wickedly before taking it into her mouth and taking a bite. Her tongue emerged to clean her lips of the cream cheese just as he popped the remnant into his mouth. “Is it wrong that I found what you just did unbelievably sexy?” she whispered in his ear and he proceeded to choke on his mouthful. 

She hit him on the back as he spluttered, “Oh Christ don’t let me die now. Not now. Not for a blintz when I might get to kiss Betty Keller.” Betty left money on the table and they left in an avalanche of giggling and coughing. 

Back at her apartment he stood awkwardly in the living room while she bustled about the place asking if he was too hot or if she should close the window or if he wanted something to drink. She opened the refrigerator, offering beer or orange juice, water or milk. “Betty stop. What’s going on?”

“Well, you said something about kissing and now I’m really nervous. I mean I have kissed boys before but only at church socials or after the football game or whatever. I’ve never been alone with a man like this, with all this expectation, where something might actually happen. I don’t know what to do.”

“Look you don’t need to be nervous. Forget I said anything about, well, about anything. Hey, I have news about DuPont. It was written up in the Columbia newspaper. Either he had to resign or they fired him but didn’t publish it that way. And they took away the degrees of some of those guys who cheated. I have the articles back at my place. So we did actually get him. Course it cost you your job and Rupert his store but it made a difference.”

“We’re reopening. There’s a store just near St Mark’s Church. It’s going to be called the Phoenix. Publishing house upstairs, store downstairs. As to the investigation we should carry on. Look for new targets. We haven’t won yet. They’re drafting married boys now.”

“Yeah, it’ll be all of us by the end of the year. The rate they’re using up guys they’ll need all the meat they can get,” he replied.

She stared at him wide eyed. “But that means you could get drafted, or Kevin. What can we do?”

“Stop the war. That has to be the big picture but also we have to make the draft fair. At the moment rich guys don’t go. They’re in college or they get a medical exemption or some bullshit. So the rich powerful folks don’t give a shit about it. If those rich white boys were in danger of dying out there they’d stop the war pretty damn fast. In Australia it’s a lottery. Your number is your birthday so you get called up randomly. And maybe just being in college shouldn’t be enough to keep you safe. Let’s take the fight to the middle classes.” He looked at her intently, hesitating.

She liked this, planning with him, setting an agenda, working on things that mattered. “You’re right. If we have a fair draft the college protests will be even louder. It’ll get the publicity you’re talking about. Young people have the power to stop this. We can’t waste all these lives.”

She loved how she felt when she was with him like this, strategising, prioritising. It was what she was meant for and she only reached that purpose with him. She could hardly believe that the universe could have suddenly given him to her. She took the initiative and leant forward, her heart pounding, blood rushing in her ears as if she were turning handstands as she had as a child. He didn’t hesitate anymore. Once her lips touched his he pressed his mouth to her more firmly, moving his lips against hers with a soft sigh. His hand ran along her jaw in a gentle caress and she raked her fingers into the waves of his hair. She couldn’t recall ever being the girl who didn’t want anyone like this, it had been a different life entirely. There were rivers of hot desire flooding her whole body and she pressed against him needily. He pulled back gently, nuzzling against her neck and leaving his warm breath tingling on her flesh. He whispered, “You know I’m in love with you don’t you? Like hopelessly in love. Swooning and pining. Have you read O Hara? ‘I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.’ That’s just how it is.” She laughed and gestured toward the couch where her copy of Lunch Poems lay face down on the cushion. He smiled and gasped and then he was kissing her again, leaning over her and opening his mouth to bite softly on her bottom lip and slide his tongue over hers. She had told him she’d been kissed before but now she realised that she really hadn’t. 

When he pulled back again to look at her, she confessed, “I love you too. I dream of you. Always you.” He sighed and looked about in a kind of desperation and she knew that he wanted to lie down with her. She wanted that too even though the realisation shocked her. She looked at him under her lashes and whispered, “Shall we go into my room?”

“Kevin?” he murmured.

“Rehearsal. Musical about Robbie Burns. Off Broadway in the fall.” She smiled wondering what he would make of that.

“Holy hell. That sounds diabolical. But I’m glad about the rehearsal.” She took him by the hand and led him into her room, sitting awkwardly on the bed and staring at her hands as she lay them in her lap. “Hey Betty, you know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, right?” He bent to look into her eyes.

“I want to. It’s just…my mom told me that when men get excited…like if a girl leads him on or whatever, well they can’t stop. I don’t mean to lead you on but I don’t really know too much about what it’ll be like. I might get scared. Like I told you, my parents were strict.”

“I don’t know about other guys but all I want is to make you happy. So if you aren’t then I’m doing something wrong and I want to stop. Men aren’t wild animals you know. I wonder why we blame girls when men are just being assholes. Anyway I don’t have rubbers and I’m not going to knock you up so there aren’t going to be any home runs right now. OK? I’d just really like to be allowed to touch you a little. Well a lot really. May I?”

She nodded, still looking down, ashamed of wanting him as she did. “I’m embarrassed,” she whispered.

“Why? What about?”

“Because I don’t know how to act. I don’t want you to think badly of me, to think I’m easy or dirty, or frigid or uptight or, I don’t know what the hell you might think.”

“I’ll think you’re Betty. I’ll think you’re this amazing woman who I can’t believe I’m touching. I’ll think I got so lucky and I don’t deserve it and that I’d better be grateful for every minute you let me have with you. That’s what I’ll think.” 

She smiled at him nervously. “I want you to like it, to get what you want and all that. But I don’t know how. I know the mechanics but I don’t have a clue what to do to make it all work out right. Am I just supposed to lie still or should I move about or what? Should I be quiet or do you want me to say something?”

“Oh my God Betts. Someone has really done a number on you haven’t they? Let’s go back to basics here. This is really not about me having my way with you you know. I really hope that you’ll want to move. If you want to sing the star spangled banner then do that. Do whatever you want to do.” 

She laughed softly. “I guess this is a thing that ought to come naturally isn’t it? Why don’t I have that? Naturalness?”

“Let’s see if we can find it.” 

He stroked his fingers from her cheek to her jaw, down her throat to the top of the buttons of her blouse. He looked at her face to see if she was scared or reluctant and found nothing but curiosity there so he slowly pushed one miniature pearl button through its buttonhole. There was a tiny patch of pale skin exposed and he leaned forward and placed a soft kiss there. Then, his long fingers slowly pushed another button from its position. Another patch of skin, this time flushed a light pink, a glimpse of her décolletage exposed, another kiss, a low inhalation, another button, another kiss, a moan. He could see the lace of her brassiere heaving as she breathed deeply, her breasts quaking a little as she trembled. “Is it OK? You aren’t scared?”

“No,” she whispered, her voice low and serious. “It’s incredible. How do people do anything else? My heart is thumping so hard.”

He reached forward and undid the rest of the buttons and then used the flat of his hands to push her blouse from her shoulders, agonisingly slowly. He caressed her with a lingering glance and then brought his eyes to her face, hectic splashes of pink high on her cheeks now. “You’re so beautiful Betts. I mean your body is beautiful but all of you, your mind, your soul I guess. Form, like Whitman says. All of you. I want to know everything about you, share everything with you. Will you let me know you? Really know you?”

She nodded. “I want that too. I can’t seem to stop thinking about you. Wondering what you think of things, puzzling you out. Like a Chinese box, I want to find all the secret compartments of you, all the hidden places. I want to love them all.” She pulled the blouse off completely and threw it onto the floor decisively. Then she reached for the hem of his shirt and he took the hint, raising his arms so she could pull it over his head, shaking out his hair as she threw it on top of her own garment. He stared at the pile of fabric, stunned by the erotic implications of what was essentially laundry.

Turning back to her he rested the back of his hand at the top of her breast and ran his knuckle down over the lace, brushing against her nipple so that she whined and gasped a little. Encouraged he turned his hand over and cupped her breast gently. She thrust her chest towards him and he smiled and put his arm behind her back and laid her down gently against the pillows. Now he could rest on one elbow above her as he stroked and caressed her, touching her face, her neck, the sensitive patch of skin beside her ear, her breasts, the soft depression that ran down her sternum. His slow exploration found a place at the back of her shoulder which made the flush deepen on her cheeks so he kissed and suckled there and she panted and made a soft mewling sound that travelled from her lips to the place low in his belly where he felt himself hardening. He moaned at the restriction of the denim when he was so aroused and she looked down, biting her bottom lip as she saw the evidence of his passion. “May I touch you? There?”

“Oh please. Yes. Always,” he whispered. She reached down with her hand and stroked him tentatively.

“I want to see you. Will you show me?” she said softly, not meeting his eye. He nodded and pulled off his boots before standing up. He needed to be confident now or he’d spook her. He unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned, pushing down his jeans and standing in front of her in his shorts, trying not to let her see his embarrassment at his obvious excitement. Her eyes flickered up to his and she looked meaningfully at his underwear so he pushed them down too and stood before her naked. She smiled. “I didn’t realise how beautiful men could be. You’re like a sculpture. I’d like to look at you forever.” He felt his cheeks burn red. In her presence he felt like a cinder, a piece of soot floating from the fire of her beauty.

Somehow now she seemed to have found a store of confidence. She stood on the other side of the bed and unbuttoned her skirt. She pulled it off along with her pantyhose without embarrassment but then her fingers paused at the top of her underwear. He smiled and gestured at his own nakedness and she drew in a quivering breath and took off her bra and pulled down her panties and stepped out to stand in front of him golden and naked. He thought it was likely that he was in heaven and she was an angel. He had no idea how he had gotten here but he was going to make the most of it before anyone noticed and exiled him. He knelt on the bed with one knee and reached out for her hand to bring her towards him, to lie with him. They settled on the quilt, looking into each other’s eyes. He ran a hand from her shoulder to her hip and back, over and over again until she lay back and he could run the same hand from shoulder to breast to thigh. “I feel like I’m floating,” she murmured and he smiled as he took his hand to the inside of her thigh on his way back to her breast. She gasped a little and he saw a tiny line appear between her eyes. He ran his hand slowly back, repeating the movement and this time she thrust up a little with her hips as his fingers brushed the inside of her thigh. He could be patient. He repeated again and again until she pushed her knees apart and his hand found its way between her legs to brush over the centre of her. The sound she made was glorious, a soft “Oh,” of surprise and longing, so he did it again and again, until she began to gasp and look at him with something like alarm. “I’m going to move over you my love, don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” he whispered and lay between her legs, his hand on her centre using his thumb to press against her where she was most sensitive. Now her moans were louder, less breathy and so he pushed a finger inside her just a little. She bucked with her hips and he pulled out but she whined, the crease between her brows deeper. “No, more, give me more of that. Don’t stop.” He didn’t need to be told twice so he pushed a long finger into her continuing to circle her with his thumb. Soon she was thrusting against his hip and groaning and almost sobbing. He lowered his head and took her nipple between his lips, stroking with his tongue and she fell to pieces with a cry. There were waves and aftershocks and at the end her eyes were wet with tears. “Oh my God. That was amazing. You’re amazing. How didn’t I know about this? Show me something else.”

“What would you like?” He asked, amused by her confidence and abandon. 

“I want to touch you. I want to make you feel just like that. I want to be in control.” She reached down and ran one finger down his length. It was a kind of torture.

“Ok. So that’s pretty damn exciting but if you want to do this you can be a little rougher. Guys are less subtle.” He took her hand in his and wrapped it around himself trying to stop his eyes rolling back into his head at the sensation of her hot hand around him. “Ohhh,” he moaned as she tentatively stroked him. Keeping his hand over hers he guided her on speed and pressure but it was quickly clear to him that it was going to be a brief encounter. “Betty, it’s going to get messy if you carry on. You better stop.”

She grinned at him, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “I want to see it happen. Is that weird?”

“It’s amazing. Oh God,” he pushed her back a little and covered her hand with his as he came gasping to his climax and collapsed backwards onto the bed wishing that he had been able to hold out longer. “You’re wonderful. I’m sorry, I made a mess.” She leaned over him and kissed him deeply. 

“You’re magnificent and sexy and I want you and I wish you had…you know. Hey I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow and get him to give me the pill. And then we’ll do it over and over until we can’t do it anymore or the neighbours complain or something.” She was giddy and giggly so he kissed her before scuttling to the bathroom to take care of the evidence.

She made good on her promise about the doctor and there followed a kind of honeymoon. Jughead spent almost every night at Betty’s apartment while Kevin made himself at home in Joaquin’s place a few blocks over in Little Italy, Joaquin telling his half Italian, half Spanish, entirely devoutly Catholic family that his pal was staying on the couch because his wife had kicked him out. But all good things come to an end and at the end of October Jughead stopped by the Phoenix to take Betty her lunch to find everyone in the store huddled around a copy of the New York Times. The draft laws had been changed again and marriage was no longer a bar to conscription.

It took a whole three weeks before the induction letter arrived. Betty found it in the mailbox and carried it upstairs, placing it on the breakfast table without a word, looking terrified. Jughead picked it up and examined the envelope with the image of the Presidential seal in the corner and Kevin’s name on the front. “We’d better take it round to him. He needs to know right away,” he said grimly.

Kevin grinned when he saw them sneak into the back of the theatre where he was rehearsing for the play that opened in a few days, his big break. Then he noticed their expressions and the colour drained from his face as he jumped from the stage and came towards them. “Oh Christ. Already?”

Betty handed over the envelope and he tore it open. The President of the United States said “Greetings,” and then told Kevin to report for induction into the United States Army in three weeks. They’d have to recast his part. Kevin’s eyes were full of tears that he wouldn’t allow to fall and Jughead hugged him tightly as Betty sobbed. “Jesus I’m sorry man. This is just the worst. You got any kind of plan?”

“Nope. Go to Vietnam and get my ass blown off I guess. I shot my shot by fucking up Betty’s life. At least she’ll get the widow’s pension I guess. It stinks.”

“Look Kevin. Maybe it’s time to tell them about you. I know you don’t want to embarrass your dad but he can’t want you to go through this.”

“I don’t think they believe guys anymore. You hear horror stories about what they do to you if you say you’re not straight, to test you. Once you’re in there they’ve got you. It might make it even worse.” 

Jug looked thoughtful for a moment. “What about Joaquin? Is he going to get called up?”

“His brother was killed at Hiep Hung last year. Joaquin gets sole survivor exemption. For now at least.”

Jughead looked at him seriously before saying quietly “I’ve got an idea. I don’t know if you’re going to go for it though.” 

Jughead put his plan into operation a week later. Kevin had appealed against his 1A classification and been told to report to the local draft board in Lower Manhattan. Betty, Toni, Ronnie, Joaquin and Jughead trooped over there with him and they stood together outside while Toni got her camera ready. Within twenty minutes they were joined by Bill and what seemed like most of the sophomore class at Columbia. As they stood on the steps of the building Jughead looked over at Joaquin. “You sure man? Really?”

“Jones, I wish I could. But my family. It’d kill my nonna, really, just kill her. Kev, I love you. I’m sorry.” 

Kevin smiled. “It’s ok. You’re here. Maybe someday it’ll be different. That’s a good dream. Worth fighting for.” He turned to Jughead. “Come on then stud. You’re up.” Jughead looked pale and a little like he might just “meep meep” right out of there like the roadrunner but he straightened his back and walked over with Kevin to the top step right outside the door. 

He glared at Toni with her camera. “You ready Topaz? Because this is absolutely a one time deal and if you miss the shot it’ll all be for nothing.” 

Toni raised the camera and grinned. “Ready, let’s make dirty pictures.”

Jughead turned back to Kevin with a grimace and said, “I’m fucking leading Keller. And keep your goddamn tongue to yourself.”

“You aren’t so sexy, Jones. Don’t overestimate your appeal just because my wife is cuckoo for you,” laughed Kevin and then stopped abruptly when Jughead grabbed him by the shoulders, leaned him backwards and kissed him passionately. The assembled crowd of students whooped and yelled, Toni clicked the shutter over and over and Betty blushed to the roots of her hair in the presence of some unanticipated feeling. Within seconds there were guards emerging from the building only to find two men making out at their front door. One of them raised a rifle to use the stock on the entwined couple and Toni whirled around to get the best angle for the shot. The other guard grabbed Kevin by his hair and pulled him from Jug’s arms, saving them from a painful encounter with a rifle butt. 

“What the hell are you two perverts doing here?” yelled the man.

“I have a meeting with the draft board,” said Kevin. “I’m going to Vietnam. So exciting. All those handsome soldiers. I can hardly wait.”

“You ain’t going nowhere you fruit,” said the other guard and dragged him inside by the elbow. “Not when I tell ‘em about the scene you’ve been making out here.” Kevin shot back a grin over his shoulder as he disappeared inside and the students outside began to sing “We Shall Overcome,” while they waited for Kevin to reemerge. It was fortunate that the guards had seen Toni taking pictures because they knew that if Kevin came out of that building with fresh bruises there would be no possible deniability. He was inside for less than twenty minutes before emerging victorious to take his applause on the steps. 

“The President has changed his mind,” he yelled. “He’s revoked his invitation so you must all come and see me in Great Scott at Theatre Four on West 55th.” The crowd cheered and Toni moved through the crowd taking her pictures.

By that time Jughead was already at the back of the crowd with Betty. Once Kevin was out and safe Jug turned to Betty and whispered, “I really need to make love to you. My sex drive is feeling pretty shrivelled about now.”

“You were magnificent Jones. It was weirdly arousing. Have you seen “Jules et Jim”? 

“As we say in New York fuggedaboutit. Once was more than enough to let me know that I really am only interested in kissing you Mrs Keller and definitely not your husband.”

The next week’s East Village Eye had a photo on the cover of two guys kissing on the steps of the draft board office under a banner headline that read “Make Love Not War” with an article inside that suggested kissing for peace and, more importantly, to avoid the draft. The images of an armed guard raising a rifle stock threateningly as two lovers embraced seemed to sum up the nature of the struggle for many and it was a cover that found its way onto the dorm room walls of many students, straight or gay, male or female, black or white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts was a literary magazine founded in 1962 by Ed Sanders (Yeah, him again!)
> 
> Muhammad Ali aka the Louisville Slugger (previously Cassius Clay) refused to be drafted in 1966. He said "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”
> 
> “I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world" is from Frank O Hara’s poem Having a Coke With You 
> 
> Jules et Jim is a 1962 French New Wave romantic drama film, directed, produced and written by François Truffaut about a love triangle/ menage a trois


	7. Epilogue

When Jughead Jones stood to read poems at The Twilight for a few weeks after his appearance on the cover of the East Village Eye kids would yell out “Where’s your boyfriend?” but he grinned and told them that love was love. It became something of a catchphrase of his and eventually was the title of his first published collection of poetry. He used that volume to support his application for reclassification as a conscientious objector and was duly reclassified 1A-O. In later life with his partner Betty he raised four children. He also published numerous works of poetry and non fiction and, with his ex wife Toni Topaz-Lodge, he made a number of well received campaigning documentary films on social issues as well as one which resulted in the conviction of a Senator for murder.

Betty Keller became a formidable force in publishing, championing marginalised writers through her Phoenix Imprint. She was also an activist, campaigning on women’s issues, against war and, alongside her ex husband, for equal marriage. She married the renowned poet and activist FP "Jughead" Jones on July 24th 2011, the date when equal marriage was finally legalised in New York.

Toni Topaz became a renowned fashion photographer and documentary filmmaker. Her images of her partner Ronnie Lodge’s fashion collections are among the most iconic images of the late 1960s, focusing on the woman’s enjoyment of the clothing rather than presenting them solely as objects of the male gaze. As a documentarian she exposed political corruption, human rights abuses and helped solve crimes.

Kevin became an activist and a hero of the Stonewall Riots. When he was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award his father, Colonel Tom Keller, told the audience that he was the real hero in the family and passed him his Medal of Honour along with the award. Kevin and Joaquin were married on July 24th 2011 after forty six years together.

Bret Weston Wallis married Donna Sweett on August 26th 1965, less than two hours before the marriage draft exemption was ended and thus avoiding draft eligibility. Their only child, a daughter Agrippina was born on July 27 1966, nine months and one day after the Selective Service revoked its policy of not drafting childless husbands and thus making her father ineligible for the draft, again. Wallis served two terms as a Senator for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket before he was ousted following allegations that he had sexually harassed a junior campaign volunteer. Two months later he was found dead, having apparently drowned in only two feet of water off his own dock. His widow Donna took over as Senator in his place at the next Senate elections until her arrest and subsequent conviction for his murder.


End file.
